Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

in place. “If they’re right, maybe we’ll both disappear before noon, fools that we are.”

“Boon,” I said, “what did you mean, that last day in town? You said she was dead.”

She heaved a deep sigh and turned back to me, buttoning up the threadbare shirt Jing Fong had given her and rolling the question around in her mind. Her lips parted and she started to speak, but in an instant her eyes popped wide and she clamped her mouth shut, turning her right ear toward the gaping roof. Boon heard it before I did—the jangle of gear and splash of hooves in the river nearby, snorting horses and grumbling men.

Someone was coming. Boon shot a worried glance at the girl, still asleep on the floor, then to me. Her hand was already at the grip of her Colt. I pulled my knife and mourned the loss of the Winchester. Then, together we went to the door to see about our visitors.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Three men, three mounts. The men wore dungarees and dusty hats. There were bedrolls wrapped in slickers cinched to their saddles, like they were expecting rain. Or else expecting to be on our trail long enough it might could rain. In any event, they were there now. My first thought upon spying them through the narrowly cracked door was of the Mormons, whether they’d given us up or if some harm had come to them. I wondered too if they knew we had a child with us and whether they’d care. On that latter account, I reckoned not. These were not lawmen. They were mercenaries if ever I had seen one, which I had. Somebody had a price on us, me and Boon, and these were the fellows out to collect.

“This for Willocks, you reckon?” I whispered to Boon. “Or is this your pa’s bunch?”

“Could be either,” she said, wincing at my calling Stanley her pa, “or both. We need more than just one gun.”

“I don’t guess asking for one would do much.”

“You reckon?” She gave me a sharp look. I shrugged. “Split them up is what we got to do. Get one apart, get what he’s shooting with.”

“Then it’s fair.”

Boon said, “Nothing is ever fair.”

“Reckon not,” I said.

She motioned at the roof and I nodded, went softly to the big hole and sucked in a deep breath before attempting to climb up. The girl was awake then, staring. She looked no more or less afraid than she always did. I smiled, rolled my shoulders.

“I am too old and too fat for this shit,” I said, and I reached up to grip the timber around which the tarpaper had collapsed. Boon watched me, earing back the hammer on her .44. I faltered twice, the second time nearly falling on my ass, but on the third try I managed to find purchase and, slowly and painfully, pulled myself up through the hole and onto the cabin roof. I farted loudly in the process. No one seemed to notice.

I slumped over the timber, all but certain it would crumble beneath my weight, but the beam held and I could hear how close the riders were now. So, too, I could feel how stupid I was for doing this. A distraction, a decoy with no gun. There were dumber ways to die, but I’d always hoped for a little more dignity than that. Maybe I never did have much horse sense. I didn’t reckon the very dumb were tipped off to the fact that they were dumb.

Hooves and forelegs caked with mud, the horses loped up to within five or six yards of the shanty, where the point man raised one gloved hand to halt the procession. He pushed his hat back on his head and squinted, his face a network of deep wrinkles, like a spiderweb. The man had not yet spotted me. I stayed flat against the roof, waiting on Boon to make her move.

That move came when she slid the barrel of her .44 through the crack in the door and squeezed off a shot, sending a bullet clean through one rider’s right arm. The limb flapped wildly and the man screamed, batting at it madly with his other hand. Boon slammed the door shut and the other men, the point man and his sole uninjured rider, drew revolvers and started shooting. I tried to flatten myself still more but it was nothing doing. Beneath me, Boon crouched behind the fireplace. The child cowered behind her, compressed into a tiny ball and trembling with fear.

Boon shot me a look. It was all I needed.

“Hey, peckerwood!” I hollered, waving my arms in the air like an idiot or a lunatic or both.

“On the roof, Sam!” shouted the injured rider.

Sam, the point man, raised his gun and fired two shots at me, missing both times as I scuttled down the roof and down to the ground on the backside of the cabin. I moved to the corner, listened closely to the hoofbeats, and the second I saw a boot I grabbed a hold of it with both hands and yanked the rider off the saddle. The rider crashed down on top of me and together we rolled in the mud, the bastard’s dapple gray stamping the muck frighteningly close to my head.

It wasn’t Sam, nor was it the poor son of a bitch Boon got in the arm. This fellow wore a bushy yellow beard as unruly as mine had been, previous to my San Francisco transformation, and one of his eyes was so milky I reckoned he couldn’t see out of it. He saw well enough to pin me in the mud and pummel my face and neck with his hammy fists, though. I was getting sorely tired of having my ass whupped in the mud by roustabouts.

Two shots sounded on the front side of the shanty. Boon’s and Sam’s, I guessed. The jasper on top of me rained his fists down on me until I couldn’t really feel it