Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

States, or at least her territories, and I didn’t much care one way or the other anyway, so I bought myself another shot and dumped it down my gullet before I had time to think twice about it.

By then, Lily was already seated no more than ten feet away from me, on the far side of the bar by the back wall, and I would never paid her much mind at all had she not pulled a man’s pocket watch from her coat pocket to check the time. I did not know her, but I knew the watch. It was Boon’s, all right, by way of a dumbass cowboy she’d had to blow out of his saddle half a day’s ride south of the former town of Red Foot, Texas. Boon used to take the damn thing out so often I came to be mighty familiar with it, so when I spied the watch in Lily’s hand, I was fit to drop right off the stool upon which I was perched.

“Excuse me, señorita,” I croaked at her, “but if I don’t miss my guess, that there watch of yours is in fact the property of a friend of mine.”

My voice sounded slow and labored in my ears, not at all the way I’d intended the words I spoke. A man never did realize just how drunk he was until he had to put a sentence together after a passel of drinks. I was in for a real skullbender, but for the time being I was solely concerned with the provenance of the señorita’s timepiece.

Lily said, “Leave me alone, gringo.” She didn’t so much as look at me when she said it, her dark hair hanging like a veil over her narrow face. For half a second, I could have been buffaloed into thinking it was Boonsri her own self sitting there across from me.

“I don’t reckon I made myself clear,” I said to that, but before I could clarify, she closed the gap between us with two broad strides and unsheathed a Bowie knife at her hip, the blade of which kissed my throat.

“I said, leave me alone,” she hissed.

The barman muttered something in Spanish and waddled away from us. Now that we had some privacy, I gave her a lopsided smile and tried not to swallow, afraid that my Adam’s apple would bob against the blade and open my neck.

“I hear you,” I said in a sort of careful whisper. “It’s only that your watch surely does put me in mind of my friend, Boon.”

Her eyes narrowed, boring into mine, and the knife came away from my throat an inch or two; still close enough to cut, but allowing me to speak a little more comfortably if need be.

“What friend was that again?” she said after a deep breath, probably to calm herself.

“Boon Angchuan. I was with her when she got it, matter of fact. ’Course, might could be I am sore mistaken. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

I could see her jaw twitch, real up-close like, and though her eyes kept staring into mine, I shifted my gaze back to that knife. My mouth had a terrible bad habit of getting me in scrapes and tights, even with my own friends, and I was not yet convinced this was not one of them.

“I will be fucked,” Lily said then, her south-of-the-border accent syrupy and musical. “You are Edward.”

“Always have been,” I said. “Edward Splettstoesser is my name, but I do not expect you to try that out for yourself.”

“The fat man from Arkansas,” she said then with something like a small laugh, and the knife went back where it belonged, in the sheath at her hip. I reckoned myself to have lost ten or fifteen pounds in all my wandering since my glory days with Boon, but I let it go. Instead, I motioned for the bartender to return to us from where he hid by the front door, one hand twitching fair close to a scattergun propped up in the corner.

“No need for that, amigo,” I told him. “We’re all friends, now.”

“Sure,” he said, looking the two of us over. “Friends.”

With a shrug, he returned to the bar and set to pouring out two stiff shots of whiskey, one for me, and one for—

“Lily Contreras,” she said, offering a small, calloused hand.

I shook it, and before we were done with the handshaking, she swallowed her shot with one swift motion of her other hand. She was damn fast with those hands, I had to give her that. Almost as fast as Boon.

She released my hand, and I sipped my whiskey, and Lily just kind of gawked at the man she’d heard tell about but never seen, until now. I wondered what on earth my long-since vanished friend had told her about me, but a great deal more than that, I wanted to know what Boon had been up to. How did Lily know her and what had they been doing in one another’s company? As a first step toward finding out, I asked her.

She said, “Chile’s where it started. Guess you know they got a war on down there.”

I didn’t, but I kept my own counsel, eager for her to continue. Chile? I wasn’t even altogether sure where that was on the map, apart from south. But I did vaguely recall Boon mentioning it, now that I was thinking on it. Some years had come and gone since then, too, but I didn’t mention that just yet. I only wanted to listen—for once.

“Boon only ever went down there looking for Ernesto Díaz,” Lily told me, “but damned if she didn’t get swept up in all that ugliness just for getting too close to it. We both of us did.”

“Who’s Ernesto Díaz?” I asked her.

She explained.

Chapter One

Neither of us was there when it all started. I got there first, Boon maybe six or eight months later. By then, in ’81, the war was raging between Chile on the one