THREE SHOOTISTS COME TO TOWN
1965
1
THE ENGLISHMAN’S CAR was in atrocious shape, but he had been tasked with killing a man that day, that very day without delay, if possible, so there was nothing to be done about it—the car and its driver would both have to cope.
He had stolen the car, a Ford Galaxie 500 with red leatherette upholstery and faux-marble door panels, from a traveling salesman working the southern territory. The salesman picked the Englishman up on the side of the road, where he’d been thumbing a ride. After a half hour of polite chit-chat, the Englishman drew a pistol and ordered the man to pull over and get out.
“But,” the salesman sputtered, “I did you a favor, for God’s sake!”
The Englishman said: “Yes, and that’s irony for you, chum.”
“I didn’t have to, you know,” the salesman said, getting out of the car. “A lot of people wouldn’t pick up a man of your coloration.”
“You are a gentleman and a prince,” said the Englishman, and drove away.
The salesman trafficked in encyclopedias. The trunk was packed with them. The Englishman stopped and tossed them into the weeds. After a hard afternoon’s driving, the car developed a persistent knock. The Englishman drove on and a few hours later ran over some debris strewn across the road that tore the fender molding half off. The loosened metal flapped against the frame, which, in addition to the engine knock, created a din that he could not alleviate even by cranking the radio up and blasting “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes.
He tried to ignore it and focus on the task at hand. He had been hired for a ticklish bit of work by a man named Seaborn Appleton. He had made Appleton’s acquaintance following another bit of business he had done for his primary employer, who would remain nameless. Said business involved killing one Mortimer “Bladder” Knipple of Marfa, Texas, who had stabbed a man in a drunken fracas. The dead man happened to be kin to the Englishman’s employer. Restitutions needed to be made, and such debts could be paid only in blood.
The Englishman discovered Knipple brandy-drunk in a flophouse outside of Wimberley, where Knipple pulled the same dagger he’d used to kill the other man. The Englishman’s employer would have preferred Knipple be delivered alive—and if he had been, his sufferings would have been legendary—but as the Englishman had no inclination to tussle with a stabby drunk, he shot Knipple in the brain with a silenced pistol and took a Polaroid of the corpse.
When he telephoned his employer to say the job had been done, he was given Seaborn Appleton’s contact details with the assurance that any job would net a handsome payout. He called Appleton. Appleton spoke a name. It was a name the Englishman was acquainted with, in the way a territorial wrestler is familiar with the work of a man toiling in another region. The name sent the slightest twinge up the Englishman’s spine, which was a sensation he had not felt in years. He didn’t mind it at all. It told him he was alive.
It was that man the Englishman was presently making fast to murder. But again, there was the small matter of the car. It was shaking to pieces. There was a plastic hula dancer on the car’s dashboard; its hips swayed with every shake and judder. That dancer was crass, like so much of Americana. The Englishman occasionally missed the stolidity of his home country here in the land of neon and silver lamé and velvet Elvis paintings. That garishness sat against both the Englishman’s temperament and his adopted appearance—he favored well-cut suits and snappy hats, and wore his hair long and straight with the aid of a relaxing solution.
He ripped the dancer off the dash—the suction cup came free with a loud pok!—and tossed it out the window. His mind returned to the small matter of killing a man.
The Englishman was so preoccupied with the matters of the car, the man, and that man’s death that he took no notice of the person hopping antsily from foot to foot at the traffic light where he had stopped. The Englishman had needed to pull off the freeway into a sleepy burg in order to fill the tank. It was night by that point, the streets deserted save for this lone person—a man hopping about as if beset by the dire need to piss. So preoccupied was the Englishman that he didn’t even see the man snake up to the car. He took notice only when the man stuck his arm through the open window. At the end of that arm was a rusted pistol that looked to have been salvaged from a lake.
The man holding it had the skin of a decaying apple. His eyelids fluttered with some kind of sickness. Rusted or not, the gun looked powerful enough to tear the stranger’s stringy arm off if he elected to pull the trigger.
The Englishman reached to one side. The man waggled his gun in warning.
“You want money, I’m guessing?”
“That’s right,” said the man, breathing his mouth stench onto the Englishman. “You’s pretty smart, ain’t ya?”
“Bright as a penny, old chap.”
The man licked his lips, cracked and salt-whitened. “You talk stupid.”
The Englishman retrieved his wallet, fat with bills—he did not believe in banks, or of records of any sort—and handed it out the window. The man was so taken with the wallet’s plumpness that he did not see the Englishman reach for his own weapon, a silenced Colt 1903 that lay beneath a folded copy of the Hobbs Daily News-Sun on the passenger seat.
The Englishman shot the stringy fellow through the car door. There came a sharp report as a slug drove through one-sixteenth of an inch of Detroit rolling iron. A hole sprouted as if by magic in the man’s belly. He fell onto the street, shrieking and clawing at his stomach.
“Give me back my billfold,” the Englishman said calmly.
“You shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh—!”
“Shot you. Yes, I did. The wallet, man. Give it to me now, or I will put the next one in your wrinkly bollocks.”
The man’s face twisted in agonized incomprehension.
“Your balls, sir. Your oysters. Again, and for a final time, the wallet.”
The man managed to scrape it up and, groaning, blood pissing through the hole in his gut, handed it through the window. The Englishman glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nobody had witnessed the event, and tipped an imaginary cap to the man he’d shot.
“Heigh-ho.”
“I need a doctor!” the man wailed.
The Englishman said, “You’ll need an embalmer.”
The man sat on the street. Blood burped from the hole in his stomach. His mouth hung open in horror, spittle foaming on his lips.
“I suggest you crawl to the nearest clinic,” said the Englishman. “Or wait it out where you’re sitting. Either way, it oughtn’t take long.”
THREE HOURS LATER, the Englishman piloted the car up a hill that crested onto a plateau staggered with bur oaks. To the west lay the razor-backed peaks of the Mogollon Range. The San Francisco River valley spread out beneath him. The lights of Mogollon township glittered in the new dawn.
2
MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE had come to Mogollon to kill a man.
Seaborn Appleton was that man’s name. The Chemist, as he was otherwise known. Einstein with a chemistry set. Appleton created acid that could rip your scalp off and fill your brain with fanciful visions. Supercharged PCP that would keep you high a full day. Wild and wonderful stuff that had the dope fiends, speed freaks, and needle jockeys lining up down the block for a taste.
Appleton had acquired Micah for protection. Appleton did not maintain a home base. He preferred the life of the traveling snake oil salesman. Appleton went from town to town in a VW camper van, peddling his wares. It seemed a perverse way to live, but upon scrutiny it made sense. The supplies he required were often available only with a prescription, so they had to be procured from pharmacies and hospitals—at night, after hours, with the help of a lockpick set. Following these thefts, those places adopted better security measures. Then it was time to move on to another town.