Gunsight isn’t one of the well-known ghost towns. It’s too far off the beaten track, and not very impressive. A hundred years earlier it was a mining town, and a couple of old smelters still stood. So did a dozen wooden, false-front buildings.
I drove slowly down the main street, my eyes searching the buildings. William Bonney showed in the door of a saloon and flagged the Jeep down. “Get out of the Jeep,” he said, “and walk to the middle of the street.”
“Where’s my wife?”
He said something over his shoulder and Mary Kay yelled to me. “I’m all right, Jim. Please, don’t fight him. I saw him practicing. He’ll kill you.”
“Walk to the middle of the street,” he said, “or I’ll kill her right now.”
The sun was hot and the street ankle deep in dust. But I walked to the middle and turned to face Bonney. He walked out of the saloon and into the street, his eyes never leaving mine. My mouth was dry, my heart beating so fast and hard I was afraid it would burst.
We stood in the street, forty feet apart. I was absolutely certain I was about to die. All because of some foolish myth about the code of the West. All because...
I don’t know where the idea came from. Maybe it was from thinking about that damnable code. I didn’t know how good the idea was, but I did know it was my only chance.
“This is the way it was meant to be,” Bonney said. “Just the two of us, facing each other over the barrel of a gun, and the best man wins.
“I’m going to throw a silver dollar as high as I can. When it hits the ground we both draw. Agreed?”
“You’re a liar and a coward,” I said. “If you really wanted a showdown you wouldn’t have brought help.”
His face took on a puzzled expression. “Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I came alone.”
Slowly raising my left hand, I pointed over his shoulder.
“Then who the hell is that?” I asked.
He instinctively turned his head to look. I drew the moment his eyes were off me, not trying to be fast, simply lifting the Colt from the holster and thumbing back the hammer as I extended my arm.
At the sound of the Colt being cocked Bonney jerked his head back around. His eyes opened wide and he drew. But I was already squeezing the trigger. The Colt bucked in my hand and I saw the bullet jerk Bonney around. There was blood on his shirt, but he had his own Colt out and was trying to raise it.
I aimed carefully and fired again. The bullet made an ugly whumping sound as it struck him right below the breastbone. The Colt flew out of his hand and he folded, landing on his face in the dust. He rolled over and I walked to him, the Colt still in my hand.
His shirt was covered with blood, and a thin trickle of red ran from the comer of his mouth. But he was still alive, still able to speak. “You... you cheated!” he said. He coughed and more blood stained his lips. “The code. You broke the code of the West. You...”
No more words came and I looked down at him. “I tried to tell you,” I said. “The code is a myth. The only code any of them followed was, get the other guy before he gets you. That’s what I did.”
Bonney’s eyes turned to glass and I knew he was dead. Holstering the Colt, I walked to the saloon. Mary Kay was sitting in a comer, her hands and feet tied, but unharmed.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did you kill him?”
“He’s dead. He just didn’t understand what the real West was like. In a way, I feel sorry for him.”
I untied Mary Kay and she came into my arms. “I’m just glad it wasn’t you,” she said. “Take me home.”
As we drove out of Gunsight I glanced back at the body still lying in the middle of the street. “I think my next novel will be a mystery,” I said. “Or science fiction. I believe I’ve had enough of the Old West for a while.”
Layover
by Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman is one of those figures whose presence is felt in every area of the crime field. He has distinguished himself as a writer, earning an Edgar nomination in 1991; he is the editor of many notable crime fiction anthologies, including the successful series Cat Crimes; and he is one of the founders and the publisher of Mystery Scene Magazine, an important journal of mystery fandom...
In the darkness, the girl said, “Are you all right?”
“Huh?”
“I woke you up because you sounded so bad. You must have been having a nightmare.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.” I tried to laugh but the sound just came out strangled and harsh.
Cold midnight. Deep Midwest. A Greyhound bus filled with old folks and runaway kids and derelicts of every kind. Anybody can afford a Greyhound ticket these days, that’s why you find so many geeks and freaks aboard. I was probably the only guy on the bus who had a real purpose in life. And if I needed a reminder of that purpose, all I had to do was shove my hand into the pocket of my peacoat and touch the chill blue metal of the .38. I had a purpose all right.
The girl had gotten on a day before, during a dinner stop. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty, but then neither was I. We talked, of course, the way you do when you travel; dull grinding social chatter at first, but eventually you get more honest. She told me she’d just been dumped by a guy named Mike, a used-car salesman at Belaski Motors in a little town named Burnside. She was headed to Chicago where she’d find a job and show Mike that she was capable of going on without him. Come to think of it, I guess Polly here had a goal, too, and in a certain way our goals were similar. We both wanted to pay people back for hurting us.
Sometime around ten, when the driver turned off the tiny overhead lights and people started falling asleep, I heard her start crying. It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t hard, but it was genuine. There was a lot of pain there.
I don’t know why — I’m not the type of guy to get involved — but I put my hand on her lap. She took it in both of her hands and held it tightly. “Thanks,” she said, and leaned over and kissed me with wet cheeks and a trembling hot little mouth.
“You’re welcome,” I said, and that’s when I drifted off to sleep, the wheels of the Greyhound thrumming down the highway, the dark coffin inside filled with people snoring, coughing, and whispering.
According to the luminous hands on my wristwatch, it was forty-five minutes later when Polly woke me up to tell me I’d been having a nightmare.
The lights were still off overhead. The only illumination was the soft silver of moonlight through the tinted window. We were in the backseat on the left-hand side of the back aisle. The only thing behind us was the john, which almost nobody seemed to use. The seats across from her were empty.
After telling me about how sorry she felt for me having nightmares like that, she leaned over and whispered, “Who’s Kenny?”
“Kenny?”
“That’s the name you kept saying in your nightmare.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not going to tell me, huh?”
“Doesn’t matter. Really.”
I leaned back and closed my eyes. There was just darkness and the turning of the wheels and the winter air whistling through the windows. You could smell the faint exhaust.
“You know what I keep thinking?” she said.
“No. What?” I didn’t open my eyes.
“I keep thinking we’re the only two people in the world, you and I, and we’re on this fabulous boat and we’re journeying to someplace beautiful.”
I had to laugh at that. She sounded so naive, yet desperate, too. “Someplace beautiful, huh?”
“Just the two of us.”