“Ahem,” said the man, “you’ve put me in a spot, old bean.”
It was him. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. And he was right: all he had was a tricky shot at Micah’s head or his legs. Micah had the Englishman’s whole body to hit.
Of course, Micah knew that the Englishman must have already considered simply shooting the horse. But the bullets would craze through the beast’s heavy vitals, or be flattened on its bones. A gut-shot horse would buck and fuss, giving the Englishman an opportunity, but there was a much better chance that Micah would irrigate his opponent’s chest well before that.
Micah said, “I have never met a black man with straight hair. How do you do it?”
“Relaxer,” the Englishman said. “Enough to float a coal ship.”
The horse’s cock slipped from its sheath. Micah could not see its entire length due to his positioning, but what he glimpsed put him in the mind of a thick rubber hose. Not quite a fireman’s hose, girthwise, but not far off. Micah angled his gun away from the horse’s comically large member. He did not want to accidentally blow a hole through it.
“I will not lie,” the Englishman said, looking at it. “I feel unmanned. It’s not good to feel that way before a gunfight.”
“It is an animal. Our anatomies do not square up.”
“You make a good point. And yet—”
The horse pissed. Long and loud and luxurious. Droplets of urine splashed up to wet Micah’s trousers.
“My God,” the Englishman marveled. “Do you think it’s been given a diuretic?”
The horse finished. It shook contentedly and began to eat hay. This interlude having concluded, the men returned to their own business.
Micah said, “I take it Appleton hired you?”
“He did. He claims you killed two of his men.”
“I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.”
“Bully for you.”
“And you?”
The Englishman said, “I hunt people for money. I imagine most of them have been bad eggs, but I never bothered to read their diaries.”
Bold was the man who could joke with a pistol pointed at his belly.
“It’s a job to me, nothing more,” the Englishman went on. “But according to Appleton, you’ve been asking for it.”
“Who of us is not asking for it?”
“So then, why not let it go?”
“Appleton dealt me a bad turn,” Micah said simply. “I will not be done wrong.”
“Ah. You’re one of those.”
Micah set his jaw. The Englishman did not know about the baby with no arms. Micah had dreamed about that child. She was the reason, more or less, why he had to kill Appleton. He could even set aside Appleton’s treachery in dry-gulching him. That was business. But Micah hoped he’d sleep better with Appleton gone.
For this reason, he did not wish to shoot the Englishman. Not because he was scared of the man’s skills. The Englishman was a trained killer, but Micah had his own abilities in that area. He was not anxious about taking out the Englishman on moral grounds, either—he had murdered for lesser cause, sadly.
No, Micah didn’t want to fire on the Englishman because something might occur during the course of events to stop him from finishing what he’d come to Mogollon to do, that being to kill Seaborn Appleton. Kill him for that little baby with no arms.
Such was Micah’s mind-set when a woman rushed into the stable with two pistols drawn and firing.
For a split second, Micah assumed she was an apparition. He used to have similar visions when drunk, though in those, the woman was stepping naked out of a lake or naked into a bedroom—in any event, naked. But this woman was clothed in a duster the color of old fingernails and alligator-skin boots. She carried a pair of Colts that kicked skyward as she squeezed the triggers.
The stabled horses reared at the deafening gunshots. The roan slammed into Micah, knocking the wind out of him. His gun fell to the dirt. He saw the Englishman catch a slug through his shoulder. It reeled him in a sloppy pirouette. Micah grunted and knelt for his gun, spinning toward the woman—a girl, really—to return fire as the horses stampeded out the stable doors. His bullet struck a post near her head, spraying splinters. She flinched at the flying wood and fired ploddingly from the hip.
Minerva couldn’t have hoped for better luck. She had been sitting in her car scoping the main drag when, at precisely ten o’clock, she’d spotted the English twit. At two past ten, Micah Shughrue followed the British fuck into the stable. Two bugs in the kill jar. She had a mind to let them shoot each other dead, but that would not satisfy her. She had to flatline the Englishman. He would have to die first; he struck her as the sharper shot. Once he was dead, or at least down, she could focus on Shughrue.
But things began to spin out of control the moment she stepped into the stables. She’d intended to surprise them. Unsporting? Granted. But she needed every advantage against such experienced gunmen. Minerva expected to take return fire. She might even be hit. But she could withstand that, she figured.
This belief had persisted up until the moment the bullets began to sing through the air. When she charged into the stables, everything sped up. She pulled the triggers and could feel the Colts’ hammers cocking back as the springs compressed. She could even feel the firing pins strike the flash holes, igniting the powder in each round. But her own movements were lethargic—her veins running with molasses, her arms leaden.
Oh Christ oh Christ, she thought. This is happening too goddamn fast—
Micah Shughrue saw this woman coming and he did not blink. He thumbed the hammer of his own Colt and put his first shot into the Englishman’s side. Gray smoke mushroomed from the barrel; the Englishman’s tailored shirt blew inward, then out again as the bullet jolted through his innards. Turning then, his mind clear and his breath quickening, Micah fired at the woman, whom he assumed to be the Englishman’s partner despite the fact that she was firing at the Englishman, determinedly so, her lips skinned from her teeth. His bullet winged her left leg down at the calf. She continued to advance, teeth bared and wolfish, her Colts thundering.
In the midst of all this, the Englishman sat confused. A rare inertia gripped his mind. Such sudden violence when he had been anticipating a gentlemanly tête-à-tête, followed by him dispatching Micah Shughrue and collecting Appleton’s reward. But then… this harridan. An appalling harpy with murder on her mind. At once he had been winged; moments later, he was hit again, this time by Shughrue. Only then did he pull his pistol and take aim at the murderess. A bullet whizzed past his skull, making the sound of an angry hornet. One of his own bullets struck her. She collapsed behind the water trough…
Minerva crumpled behind the trough, clutching her belly. It felt as if she’d been kicked by a donkey, and yet there was no real pain—only the sudden and somehow blunt force of impact. The fact blitzed through her brainpan: I’ve been hit! She’d never been shot before. So this was how it felt. She had expected worse. All she sensed was a cold disconnect between her chest and legs, like a bunch of threads had been cut.
Miraculously, Micah Shughrue was unhurt. The Englishman had eaten considerable lead, and the woman, too. Micah could see the black man on his back with blood running out of his shirt. A fine layer of dust and hay was stuck to his face.