Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

“You would admire cruelty,” said Boon. “I do not. I do what needs doing to get where I am going.”

“And this is where you’ve come.”

Meihui struggled a little. Stanley tightened his grasp on her, and she stopped.

“This is it,” Boon said.

“Because you believe I am your father.”

“You arguing that point?”

“I’m arguing that it takes a lot more than some seed spilled in an Oriental farm girl to make a father out of a man. You have made too much of this obsession. You are nothing to me, and I am nothing to you.”

“I’m not here for hugs and kisses.”

“Indeed not. You are here to kill me. That’s all you know, is it not? Killing. And once you have killed me, what then? Who next? You don’t really think you can just stop, do you? At your age, simply transform into a real human being? You are no human being, Boonsri. You are an animal. You’re the coyote in the chicken coop, the wolf among the herd. All this blood is natural to you but an abomination to actual people. You are something that needs be destroyed.”

Tears streamed down quiet Meihui’s face. But Boon was a rock.

She said, “I believe you may be right about that.”

“You don’t say.”

“People like you and me, we’re simply no good. Born bad. We’re like cholera. Locusts. So, let’s do it, Arthur. Let’s be destroyed.”

I didn’t quite follow her plan, and all I could squeak out was her name.

“Shut up, Edward,” she said, and she raised that old ball and cap pistol so that it was aimed at her father’s face. “Let the kid go. Just you and me. It’ll be like a duel, if you want.”

Stanley laughed.

“I don’t think there’s quite enough room in here for twenty paces and all that. And I haven’t a second. No, I don’t think that will do.”

“Coward,” Boon said.

The Englishman sort of half-shrugged and showed those grotesque golden plates in his mouth again. For the first time it occurred to me that the gold used to make them probably came from that very mine. There was something poetic about returning it to where it came from.

“There are nothing but cowards here,” Stanley said. “It’s so terribly easy for people to call one a coward when watching out for one’s own ass is the paramount instinct of all living things. That, I should suppose, is why your fat friend here escaped conscription when Arkansas joined the Confederacy. It’s certainly why I’ve done half or more of the things I’ve done in my days. How about you, Boonsri? It is your supposition that this brazen act of self-sacrifice at the eleventh hour makes you—what—brave? Surely you cannot be that stupid, or you would not have made it this far.”

“How did…,” I started to say, but Boon cut me off.

“Edward ran from conscription because he did not believe in their cause. That is not cowardice. It is scruples.”

I hadn’t the first clue what the word scruples meant at the time, but it wasn’t the time to ask. Like many things Boon had said to me over the years, it would take some years yet before every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

She took the smallest of steps forward, slightly leaning back as she did so to hide the fact of her advance. It didn’t quite work, for Stanley curled his left hand around Meihui’s jaw and squeezed, causing her to cry out.

“Do not move any closer,” he said. “It is not you I will shoot if you do.”

Boon stiffened. “Then you would die on principle. For the satisfaction of having murdered a child.”

“You would not have stolen her from me if she meant nothing to you,” he said with a sneer. “You won’t let her die. I have seen firsthand how you Orientals stick together. It is admirable, but nothing that can’t be beaten out of a whelp like this one. She’s still got some worthy years left in her, I should think.” He moved the barrel of his gun up, past her ribs and dragging it over her shoulder, until at last he poked her hard in the cheek with it. “Of course, should she have her brains blown out of her little skull first, it’s hardly as though there aren’t ten thousand more just like her.

“Or just like you, my child.”

Boon was visibly shaking, her face swathed in sweat and purpling with rage in the lamplight. I could all but see the gears turning in her skull, weighing her priorities as to concluding her lifelong vengeance or ensuring Meihui’s safety. In the meantime, I was studying the situation fair hard from my vantage point, looking for a window through which I might act and solve both problems at once. No such window opened.

Finally, she lowered her Colt. Slowly, like the second hand on a clock turning down time.

“Leather it,” Stanley said.

She did. His eyes then shot to me, as though it was the first time he’d realized I was there. He didn’t have to repeat the command. One look from Boon and I complied, laying the repeater on the cold, hard ground. She and I stood there in the near dark, deep in a dead mineshaft, our hands empty. We might as well have been naked.

Though I tried like hell not to think about it, there had been times, usually late at night when all was quiet apart from the noise inside my skull, when it occurred to me that Boon was so myopic in her thirst for this man’s blood that she’d have cut me down without a second thought if she ever considered me an obstacle. It was not a nice thing to think, but the evidence always seemed to support it. This was what she was. This was all she was. For the most part it was why I rarely allowed my feelings for her to hurt more than necessary—after all, there wasn’t any room in her