Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

man and stickin’ a knife in his heart,” he said. “Sometimes killin’ is easy, and sometimes it ain’t.”

I didn’t know it then, but I learned. On occasion it didn’t much bother me and I slept like a babe, whereas other times my heart felt shaky for a day or two. Still, every man I ever killed was killed with a bullet. Every man apart from one or two when I couldn’t get a hold of a gun, anyway.

Most men Boon ever killed—at least in my presence, as she rarely spoke to me about exploits prior to my time with her—were with a bullet, too. A drunk whose clumsy advances in Nacogdoches turned besotted crapulence into spurned vengeance died badly with a steak knife in his ribs when he mistook me for a rival suitor and pulled me off of my mount with murder in his eyes, the second time Boon saved my life as I recollected. She’d been having her supper when she heard me holler and decided the knife she was already holding would be sufficient to her purposes. But apart from that, she was thoroughly a gunwoman. Her .44 was as much a part of her body as the hand that gripped it or the cold brown eyes that sighted down its barrel. Hell, once or twice I’d watched with keen fascination when she’d fallen asleep disassembling the thing to clean it and her fingers kept working at the parts even while she softly snored. That steak knife and her national provenance notwithstanding, Boon never displayed much interest or proficiency in blades.

The saw, however, was new and different. I hadn’t hesitated when she sent me after it, and I was uncharacteristically silent as she weighed it in her hands like she’d never touched one in all her life, which mayhap she hadn’t. Or more likely, she was thinking about something akin to the Tennessean sniper of my memory, taking measure of the vast difference between cutting a man down with a bullet and cutting off his head with steel sawteeth and no small amount of elbow grease.

She holstered the Colt and knelt on the judge’s chest. Her knee pressed hard against his chest and the round little man expelled a grunt.

“You cracked my rib,” he wheezed.

“Where’s your brother?” she said.

“You’ll roast in hell,” said the judge. “The devil’ll dance on your bones.”

Boon touched the sawteeth to the fat, red flesh of the judge’s neck.

She said, “Bartholomew. Where is he?”

“If you call him by his whole name when you meet him, he will kill you slower. He’s partial to Barry, but he’ll kill you one way or the other.”

“He’ll kill me the same as you was going to hang me,” Boon said. “You make a lot of promises you can’t keep, Judge.”

“I’m the God damned law here,” he said. “You savage bitch. You motherless damned beast.”

All she had to do was move her hand half an inch and the saw caught skin and pulled. Tiny crimson beads welled up, a dozen or more of them, and smeared around his throat as the judge jerked and cried out.

“Keep moving like that and you’ll do the job for me,” said Boon.

I watched this scene unfold with some interest and more than a little revulsion, and though I grew up butchering hogs and had no horror of blood, something about the slow build of the thing got to wracking my nerves and restoring that powerful thirst that plagued me when first we came to Red Foot. I stepped over the dead barman, whose devastated head was by then attracting flies both black and green, and squeezed behind the bar to see what he’d been hiding down there. My eyes lit on a dusty bottle of Old Overholt rye and I quit worrying about having to settle for corn whiskey. Just like every other bartender I ever met, the corpse at my feet had been holding out on the good stuff.

Served him right, the dead bastard.

The judge moaned some more while the whore in the chair got to snoring, and all the while Boon kept her big eyes open, staring into what passed for the judge’s soul as I sat on a barstool and pulled the cork with my teeth. It only occurred to me then that the heifer was gone; she probably wandered off when I went for the saw. That left only me for an audience to Boon, her saw, and Judge Selwyn Dejasu.

“Last time I’m gonna ask,” she said. “Where’s your brother?”

The judge suggested his brother was presently engaged in unseemly activities with Boon’s mother, which was when I decided it would be best to turn my back to them both and keep my focus on the rye whiskey. I’d never been so grateful for the absence of a mirror behind the bar, which was so often the fashion in saloons all over Texas. The Old Overholt was some of the finest liquor I’d ever poured down my throat, and it took every drop in the bottle to drown out the screaming that erupted behind me.

I woke up at dawn on top of a lumpy mattress with my boots on the floor beside me. My skull was full of sand and my mouth tasted like a grave. It wasn’t the first time Boon ever put me to bed, but I was surprised she’d had the strength and energy to haul me up the stairs after everything else that had transpired the day before. Boon was always full of surprises.

After my third failed attempt to lift my own head from the greasy pillow, she appeared in the doorway. The sun was only just rising and the room was still dark, but I could make out her unreadable face. I could also see that she’d changed her clothes into an ill-fitting blue shirt that disguised her feminine form and store-bought dungarees she’d cut roughly at the cuffs and cinched with a leather belt. I never asked to whom the clothes belonged but