Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“So, you don’t trust him either?” I asked, wanting to be sure.

Boon slowed to a stop and turned to look at me like I had three heads, all of them stupid.

“Edward,” she said, “I don’t even trust you.”

That stung some.

Willocks was seated by the window when we walked in, poking with a fork at a mess of bacon soaked in its own grease. Nearby, a dowdy woman in a blue-checked dress and an apron twiddled her thumbs and watched him fuss with the bacon, rapt. The Widow Perkins, I presumed. At least Boon wasn’t likely to find a man eating his breakfast so damned fascinating.

Boon said, “Marshal.”

“Have a seat,” said Willocks, his mouth full. “Both of you.”

She sat first, across the table from him. I sat beside her. Willocks grinned at Boon. The Widow Perkins looked offended by it. I wanted to be anywhere else but that diner.

“I’d recommend the flapjacks,” the marshal said, “but anything is good. She’s a right fine cook, that Missus Perkins.”

“Oh, Tom,” said Missus Perkins, turning pink in the face.

Any appetite I had was mostly gone. I ordered coffee.

“What do you propose, Marshal Willocks?” Boon said, ignoring Perkins and thereby forgoing breakfast.

“Straight to business,” Willocks said. “Measure of a smart woman. I like that.”

“I grew up around people I couldn’t talk to,” she said. “Small talk makes me nervous.”

“All right, then. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?”

He forked another strip of bacon into his mouth and smiled while he chewed it, setting down his fork and patting his face with a red and white napkin. The Widow Perkins deposited a cup of coffee, black and steaming, on the table in front of me. It tasted so good, only a dram of whiskey could have improved it.

The marshal pulled open one side of his jacket and withdrew a folded piece of paper from an inside pocket. This he unfolded carefully and, shoving his plate to the side, spread out on the table for us all to see.

It was a truebill for one Bartholomew Dejasu.

REWARD

$200

IN GOLD COIN

to be paid by the U.S. Government

for the apprehension of

BARTHOLOMEW DEJASU

Wanted for Murder, Robbery, Arson

and other acts against the peace

and dignity of these United States

Thomas D. Willocks,

City Marshal

Darling TEX

Underneath this great wall of ink was a line drawing, probably based on a photograph, of the wanted man in question.

I said, “What’s the D stand for, Tom?”

Boon sighed and didn’t let the marshal answer. I doubted he would have, anyway.

“Get to the meat of it, Marshal,” she said.

“You’ll understand my position that no bounty can be double-paid, which is to say you can take the coin or the information, but not both. And only when you bring Dejasu in—alive.”

“And how much did you pay for this information you claim to have?” she said.

“It ain’t negotiable, Miss Angchuan.”

“He’ll just keep that two hundred for himself,” I said.

“Probably it will go to the marshal’s office, yes,” he said. “Nothing mercenary in that.”

I scowled at him and drank my coffee.

“How am I to know the information is any good?” Boon demanded. “Or worth a tinker’s damn? Or that you got anything I’d want at all in the first place? Seems like a terrible lot to take on blind trust, which isn’t how I do business, Marshal.”

I remembered what she’d said about trust on the way there. My heart ached at the thought of it.

“Ain’t how anybody does business,” he agreed. “Leastways nobody I ever heard of. No, ma’am, it’s an unusual situation all around.”

“One you’re in control of,” Boon added.

As usual, Willocks met that with a grin. “Seems that way, don’t it?”

My coffee finished, I rose from the table and reached for my hat.

“I guess I’ve heard just about enough,” I said. “You holdin’ all the cards and us with our trousers down? No, sir. I don’t think we’ll be doing business after all.”

He raised both eyebrows at me, then turned his surprised expression on Boon. I could see what he was doing, which was silently asking her if she agreed. Because she was the boss of the operation. Did I feel unmanned by that? Probably some.

Boon drew in a long breath through her nose and let it out slowly through her mouth.

“Here’s my offer,” she said after a moment. “I’ll bring you your man, and alive if in any way possible, and you’ll give me that information you say you got from Goliad. But if you don’t, or if I don’t judge it any good or useful to my purposes, you will pay me the two hundred in gold coin just the way it’s printed on that fancy bill of yours.”

“It could be the best thing possible to your purposes,” he said, “and you could still demand the reward.”

“Could be,” Boon said.

“You are a hard woman, Miss Angchuan.”

“Could be,” she said again.

The marshal squashed his mouth up to one side, meeting her gaze and giving it a think through.

“A damned hard woman,” he said.

He didn’t know the half of it.

We rode out half past nine, due northwest, with Marshal Willocks’ wanted poster and whatever provisions we could gather in a hurry from the sundries store on Main Street. To my dismay, the sundries store sold no spirits. For that alone, I was glad to get shut of Darling, Texas.

Chapter Six

The sun was high and hot, unrelenting in its punishment for two fools riding up into the grasslands with only the vaguest notion of where we were going and what we were going to do when we got there. We were more or less in the dead center of a big, empty square between cattle trails far to the north, east, south, and west of us, leaving little by way of civilization along the way. That much suited me well enough—I’d had more than my fair allotment of run-ins with cowboys in cow towns and I could do without the odor of them or their stinking charges. Besides, there wasn’t much that depressed a man more than the sight of men working