Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

assumed she hadn’t killed anyone to acquire them. All I knew for sure and for certain was that her old getup must have been awash in blood and worse.

“What next,” I croaked. My voice startled me, sounding like my throat was full of broken glass. I wasn’t sure yet if I was going to puke or not.

“There was a letter,” she said, “among the judge’s papers kept at Laramie’s office up the street.”

“You been busy,” I said. I didn’t know if it was a question or not. It was too early to tell.

“Seems there’s a mess of Dejasu kin not a day’s ride from here,” she explained. “Someplace called Arrowpoint.”

“Arrowpoint,” I repeated, just to see how it felt in my mouth. It felt like I wished this was all over already. “Judge ever talk?”

“He had some last words. Two or three of them. None of them kind.”

“I reckon not.”

“Get a bottle of beer in you at the bar to stave off that skullbender and let’s ride,” she said. “Might could make it to Arrowpoint before dark if we don’t run across any more stray heifers.”

I sat up against the wall and raised a forefinger to indicate I needed a minute. The room spun a little but I swallowed about a hundred times to keep my gorge down.

“Used to be we was looking for your mother and father,” I said. “Now it’s some jasper neither of us ever met. We’re just getting further and further away from where we was, ain’t we?”

“It’s the same trail,” Boon said. “Just a little longer than we reckoned before.”

“Trails change,” I said. “They get dead when things change, and folks leave them to grow over and take new ones. I ’spect you wouldn’t hardly notice the difference day after day in a saddle, neither.”

“Go drink that beer,” she said. “I don’t want to be in Red Foot when the sun’s up.”

She started to leave but stopped with her back to me and head turned up. Before she could say anything about it, I smelled the smoke.

After I smelled the smoke, I saw it, too. Black and thick, snaking up into the hallway from the floor below.

And then, having both smelled and seen the smoke, Boon and I heard from the arsonist.

“My name is Barry Dejasu,” he hollered from outside. “Burn up in there or come and get shot.”

We weren’t fixing to leave Red Foot just yet.

Chapter Twelve

“You reckon somebody got word to him?” I asked.

“That or he wasn’t much more than a fart away all this time,” Boon said.

She looked angry to me. Not scared. Never scared, not really.

I jumped back into my boots and looked out the window. The glass was filthy and cracked, and it took me a moment to get my bearings. I was looking out the back of the building and there wasn’t a whole lot behind it other than mud and scrub and a few whores’ cribs. Red Foot didn’t comprise much apart from the main street and the ramshackle buildings that lined up tightly on either side of it with their false fronts and no boardwalk. I thought I could see some movement in the distance, but it was probably just a deer. Barry Dejasu wasn’t back there. He was downstairs or out in the street, waiting for us.

“This fuckin’ place gonna burn up like kindling,” he shouted. “Best make up your minds.”

“I guess he’s right,” I said.

“I’ll go see him, then,” said Boon, calm as you please.

“You do what you said you was going to do?” I asked her. “With that saw, I mean.”

She nodded soberly.

“I done it.”

“Barry ain’t going to like that.”

“He ain’t.”

“All right then,” I said with a grunt as I stretched my back. I wasn’t getting any younger and that lousy bed was worse than sleeping on the ground. “I’ll go with you.”

From the landing I couldn’t see him. The bar was completely engulfed in flames. It looked like he’d doused it with the rotgut the barman usually served in lieu of the Old Overholt he’d secreted away. That stuff was mighty flammable and probably not fit for human consumption, but the Lord knew I’d drunk plenty of it and its like over the years. The fire was slowly but surely crawling away from the bar, creeping over the floor and up the walls. My eyes stung and my throat burned badly. I turned away from the smoke and found the chair the judge had been sitting in, underneath that awful picture of the girl and the bear, when first we’d seen him the night before. He was there again now.

Or at least most of him was. Above the hollow of his throat there wasn’t any of Selwyn Dejasu to speak of. I didn’t know who had propped him up there, Boon or Barry, but I didn’t think it mattered. Fact was, Barry Dejasu had seen what Boon did, and whatever his purpose had been when he arrived at the Red Foot in Red Foot that morning, it was now to kill the strangers responsible for the death of his brother. In his shoes, I’d have been about the same business, so I couldn’t really blame him.

Boon knelt at the top of the steps and picked up what I figured for a sack, but turned out to be the blood-soaked shirt she’d had on throughout our hogwash trial. As a matter of fact, she’d had it on for some weeks by then, so I reckoned it was about time she changed into something else, anyway. Things worked out all right in that small way.

The shirt-sack had some heft to it due to its contents, which I could guess at. The smoke was gathering up thick at the ceiling by then, threatening to put an end to us before either the fire or Dejasu his own self could get around to it. I wondered how long it would be before the whole damn saloon was burning, and how long after that before the fire spread to