Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

good start to a plan in my mind, so naturally I expected more good thinking to follow.

Instead, Boon pulled that old Colt from its leather and fired one round at the lantern hanging beside the tavern’s front door. The glass shattered and burning oil spread across the front of the building, crawling like white-red hands over the door and tarpaper roof.

I cussed then and dropped into a squat. But Boon never stopped moving, even when she took the shot. The gun was still out and in her hand, too, as she picked up the pace and hollered into the blaze.

“Arthur Billings,” she roared. “I have come for you.”

The greased paper windows burned up quickly, leaving two gaping holes on either side of the door, through which I could see a dozen or so figures scampering around in the smoke and flames. The back door burst open and a couple of men went scuttling out into the night, coughing and cussing. From inside the tavern, a shot cracked out. I presumed it was somebody shooting at us, so I jacked a round into the chamber of my Winchester and took aim.

The front door flew open then, and a fat man with sparks eating up his great black beard barreled out. The fat man did not have a gun, but he did have a sizable knife, the kind we used to call an Arkansas toothpick back home. I carried one myself. He paid me no mind, but the fat man was astonished at the sight of Boonsri Angchuan approaching from the darkness.

“Boys,” he called back into the inferno, “there is a Mex bitch out here aiming to kill us.”

Boon shot him in the chest. The fat man let loose a screech like a bird and fell back into the fire. I figured he could not have been Arthur Billings or Stanley or whoever, as surely she would have had some words for the man before she killed him. But what did I know? My own father was dead going on twenty years by then, but I had not killed him. As far as I knew, I had never known anybody who had killed their own father or even wanted to. This was new territory for me.

“All I want is the Englishman,” Boon said.

I wondered if maybe there was more than one man from England in there, and if so, what they would do about it.

The Blind Dog wasn’t much of a building and in all likelihood not built to last. As such, it did not take long for the roof to fall in, which sent up a great plume of coal-black smoke and burning ashes. Men shouted and cursed inside, and not a few more went scampering out. I jammed the stock of my rifle against my shoulder, following one and then another with the barrel, looking back to Boon and somewhat panicked as to what I should do. She paid me no mind. Her attention was on the men scattering from the blaze she started, her eyes narrowed in the bright, hot hell of it, looking for the man she had come to call out and, presumably, kill.

Some of them were armed, and they fired wild shots at us. I fired wildly back, levering one cartridge after another, missing most of the time, though I managed to catch one in the thigh, a towering red-headed fellow who went down screaming. Again, I tried to get some sort of instruction from Boon, who went slowly toward the man, looking him over. The man grasped at his wound, spurting blood black as pitch, but when he saw Boon drawing near he found his shooter on the ground and swung it up at her. I shot him, right in the teeth.

Boon pivoted where she stood and showed me a face meaner than the Devil.

“Damn you, Edward Splettstoesser,” she said.

“I should have let him shoot you?” I said.

“Go ’round back and chase some of them others down,” she barked at me. “Only kill them that need killing. Dead men won’t tell me one damn thing.”

“They’re long gone, Boon,” I protested. Even on foot, I’d never find anybody out there in the dark, but I could hear the distinct sound of hooves beating the earth full chisel well past the miners’ shacks to get away from the mess we’d made.

Her plan-that-wasn’t-a-plan hadn’t gone according to plan, it seemed.

“Damn you, Edward,” she said again, only this time without my surname. I couldn’t blame her. It was a mouthful.

I thought to remind her that she was the one who shot out the lantern, but I decided it was wiser to keep my trap shut. Instead, I got as close to the flames as I could without igniting myself, and I peered into the wreckage of the Blind Dog to see if anyone remained inside. All I found were bodies blackened by fire, roasting to the marrow.

If her father had been Arthur Billings, and if Arthur Billings had been in the Blind Dog, there was no telling now. He would have either escaped or been burned so badly nobody would ever know.

Except we did know, eventually. We remained in the area another two weeks, wandering from Wichita Falls to Del Rio, sniffing around like hounds for any news of the men from the truebill. There was nothing at all until we got to a stinking cow town called Marshall’s Bluff that had two things on its easternmost side to greet incoming visitors: a sign proclaiming the place’s name and a pair of gray corpses hanged by their necks from a red oak. They were, we learned, none other than Ambrose Umberton and Shotgun Arthur Billings, whose true Christian name was Alvin Speers.

Alvin Speers was not Boon’s father. She was assured by the fact that the blackening corpse belonging to him had a mouthful of rotten teeth. Stanley, I learned, had a mouthful of gold.

It was two weeks wasted, and Boon was no closer to finding either of her parents.