Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“What’re they going to do?” he said.

I shrugged.

“You can’t stand by this,” he said. “You can’t. Matter of fact, I’ll see to it you walk away free if you let me go.”

“You try and go,” I said, “and I’ll cut you down.”

“Back-shooter,” he seethed.

I shrugged again.

Boon said, “No sense wasting time, then.”

She moved behind Willocks and drove him forward while Merrick seized him by the arm and pulled him into the cabin. Boon came in last and shut the door. I heard it latch. One of the horses nickered. I moved away apiece and sat down in the short grass and pulled long at the neck of the bottle. It was dreadful stuff. But it did the trick.

Inside the cabin, Marshal Tom Willocks screamed. It didn’t take long. I drank some more. It got better the more of it I drank. In my head I could see Boon sawing off the marshal’s head, and no matter how much I tried not to think about that, it was all I could think about. Of course, a headless man wasn’t going to tell her anything. But Boon was capable of just about anything. And the fact of the matter was that I wasn’t sure how I ought to feel about that anymore.

How could a man ride with someone for as long as I’d ridden with Boon and not hardly ever know what to expect from her? A good part of it was that I was accustomed to sorting things out about people based on what I already knew about people in general, and there wasn’t anybody else in the whole country like her. Maybe the whole world, though I’d never been to any other countries except maybe Mexico so I couldn’t speak to that. I had my suspicions, though. I did not honestly believe there lived the likes of her in any corner of the planet. That was a bit of what drew me to her. It was a bit of why she scared me more that I wanted to admit, too.

It wasn’t like I worried she’d ever do anything to harm me. I didn’t worry about that at all. It was the unknown—the unknown and the unknowable. Men fear what they can’t sort out for themselves. Always had, always would. That was how come so many men acted so big when inside they felt so small. In my experience, every man felt small. The bigger he acted, the smaller he really was. And I was small as a bug. Small and afraid. There was so much I couldn’t figure, and a lot of the time Boon was at the top of that particular list. Sometimes I acted big, too. God knew it didn’t fool her.

Nothing ever fooled her.

The screaming didn’t last long, though at the time it sure felt like it did. Probably it only went on for about five minutes, and after that things were relatively quiet. Quiet enough that I could hear the horses browsing the short grass from where I sat. I could also hear soft voices in the cabin. I made no mistake about it; Boon rarely raised her voice. She could put more fear of God into a man with a whisper than any man could with a shout. I reckoned there was more than enough fear to go around inside that cabin.

Chapter Sixteen

I didn’t see Tom Willocks ever come out of that cabin.

Boon I didn’t see until dawn. I slept out under the stars. I guessed she’d slept in the cabin, with Franklin Merrick, if she slept at all. I was eating peaches out of a can and wishing hard for some coffee when she came out and said, “We’re going west.”

“West Texas?” I said.

“More west than that,” she said.

She crammed her hat down on her head with the little red feather bouncing in the breeze and she stepped up into the palomino’s saddle. Franklin appeared in the doorway, watching her. She touched the brim of her hat in his general direction as she reared the horse around. Franklin nodded.

I tossed the can into the grass and hurried to my mount.

“What about Willocks?” I said, jabbing the beast to catch up with Boon.

“He talked some.”

“What’d he say?”

She didn’t answer for a while. I turned in the saddle to look back at the cabin. The door was already shut, Franklin’s breakfast cookfire putting smoke up the chimney. A short while later, we rode down into an arroyo and I couldn’t see the cabin anymore. We followed the arroyo up into some hill country a ways where we crossed over to a trail that wasn’t much more than some muddy wagon ruts. I hadn’t really bothered to check my mount’s shoes when we bought her, and I was hoping to Christ the mud didn’t suck them right off her hooves.

“California is what he said,” Boon said, some time after I’d asked her about it.

“San Francisco?” I said.

“Thereabouts.”

“Where you’re from.”

“I’m from Siam.”

“Where you grew up, then.”

“After Connecticut,” she said.

“Right back to where you started out,” I said. “One big damn circle.”

“I wasn’t really following her trail before. I was after him.”

“Your pa.”

Boon nodded.

“You think he’s still somewhere in Texas?”

Boon shrugged.

“Willocks dead?”

Boon shook her head. “Not when I left him he wasn’t.”

“Your friend going to kill him?”

“Not my business,” she said. “Franklin sure don’t cotton to lawmen, though.”

“I gathered that,” I said. “Can’t say as I blame him. California, then.”

“California,” Boon said.

She was holding the dead cowboy’s pocket watch in one hand and staring hard, straight ahead.

Part Two

Revelation

Chapter Seventeen

A couple days’ ride west from Merrick’s cabin, Boon led us into some growing town on the Texas-New Mexico line that seemed to exist just for the sodbusters kicking shit on the periphery. There had been other towns, but this was the only one that had the two things she was looking for: a livery stable and a railroad station. She sold our horses to the trader at the livery without anything anybody would call negotiation, which is to