He thought: Well, it will not be where I was that will count. It will be what I did.
Only then, after he had looked his fill, only then did Books acknowledge the existence of the others. Jay Cobb he could identify by his youth; Serrano by his plug-ugliness; Pulford by his attire and dealer's hands. The man in flowered suspenders and derby hat, Cross-eye's sidekick, he could not. One by one he considered them. He sensed their awe of him, and their unease. They knew why he had come, or believed they did, but none of the three principals, Cobb or Serrano or Pulford, understood why in hell the other two were here. And in their turn they stared at him, and waited, motionless, and stared. They were like actors on an empty stage, the five. The curtain had risen, the hour come. But they had no audience, save for one another, and even more bewildering, they had no play. They were assembled to take roles for which no lines had yet been written, to participate in a tragedy behind which there was no clear creative intent, to impose upon senselessness some sort of deadly order.
Books gave them a cue. Stepping to the center of the bar, boot heels clicking on the tile, he turned his back to them.
The barkeep slid along the bar to him, treading on eggs. He was a long drink of water called "Mount" Murray, and he had moved from the Acme to the Constantinople when the latter opened. The wages were better, the atmosphere higher-toned. Murray had noted them enter, first the four, now the man who must be J. B. Books. What he was about to witness he could not imagine, except that it would be slaughterous, and every instinct clamored that on the floor or under the billiard table or any damned where in that room would be a damned dangerous place to be.
"Sir?" he said.
"I will have a glass of white wine," said Books.
"Yes, sir."
The barkeep poured a glass, and when he set it on the bar Books put down his dollar bill. Murray did not seem to see it. He about-faced and strode along the bar past the billiard table and through the archway with as much dignity as his ladder-legs would allow.
Books was alone. Using his left hand, resting his right on the bar near the opening between the lapels of his Prince Albert coat, he sipped the wine. He faced the mirror, in which was reflected the entire panorama of the room behind him, and its occupants.
He thought: Watch now, Victoria, watch. We are checking to each other now, which is a word we use in poker, a game of cards, but any second one of them will bet. One of them, Your Majesty, will make a move.
Waiting, surveying the room in the mirror through an opacity of pain, he could accept at last the horror of his countenance. This was the face the world would see tomorrow, at the undertaker's, after it had paid its fifty cents. It would have its money's worth tomorrow, and tomorrow night, bad dreams.
He thought: I do not know which one it will be, or what will happen, but neither do they. So we start even. No, not even, they are well and I am not. But I have an edge too. They want to live.
It was silent in the Constantinople. And yet, threaded through the silence was a breathing, a soft and rhythmic respiration. It was the fans overhead, turning slowly, easing the stale and anxious air.
He thought: All right, you sons of bitches. I have given you your chance, now give me mine. Give me some meaning. Let's go.
Rising at his table in the left rear corner, tipping his chair over backward, Jay Cobb drew the Colt's on his right thigh and fanned and fired three times at J. B. Books.
His first round missed its mark. It hit the cash register, slicing the first column of keys from the machine, then ricocheted upward and off the ceiling.
His movement triggered another. Serrano on the instant pulled his Peacemaker from beneath the table, turning in his chair. In the interval between Cobb's first and second rounds, Cross-eye shot the youth through the chest.
Cobb fired a second round at Books while falling across a table, and a third while writhing in agony to the floor.
His second round struck the mirror behind the bar. A split of quicksilver spread from end to end. His third blew three shelves of glassware into a phenomenon of light. A cascade of shards tinkled brilliantly to the floor and bar top.
The effects of low-velocity slugs fired at close range from weapons of heavy caliber, .38s and .45s, are massive. Serrano had sent a bullet through Jay Cobb's rib cage from the right side at a distance of nine feet. After encountering bone, entering the chest cavity anteriorly, the slug tumbled through the lower lobe of the left lung, macerating it, before exiting posteriorly through the rib cage on the left side, tearing an exit wound the size of a fist. With such force was the round driven into and through and out of the body that bits and pieces of bone and shirt were found adhering to the rear-wall mural the following day, together with gobbets of lung tissue, pink and gray in color.
Jay Cobb lay still upon the floor. He was not, however, dead.
The Constantinople was unsuited, acoustically, to gunfire. Not only were the explosions magnified, they were prolonged. They crashed back and forth between the walls, they boomed from tile floor to high ceiling and downward again. They reverberated and echoed and re-echoed within the chamber of the saloon. They made awful demands upon the ears.
There was an intermission.
Books, his back turned, had not moved. Nor had he permitted himself to be surprised that Serrano had elected to shoot at Jay Cobb rather than at him. To be surprised during a gunfight, he had long ago learned, was to be dead.
He drained his glass. After this, he walked along to the street end of the bar, rounded it, stepped over a snow of glassware to the center, found a bottle of white wine, filled his glass, and facing the room from behind the bar, considering Pulford and the man in the derby hat, who had been surprised, and Serrano as they eyed each other and him, sipped wine again.
When the echoes in the room had faded, the aftermath of silence was broken by a sucking sound.
Jay Cobb had incurred what doctors call a "sucking wound." He had hauled himself to hands and knees, and since one lung had collapsed, the macerated left, as he breathed laboriously by means of the right lung, air was drawn loudly through the gaping aperture in his left rib cage.
Now he commenced to crawl from his table toward the bar and, reaching that, toward the front door of the saloon. His progress was slow. His left lung was hemorrhaging, his chest cavity filled with blood. As he attempted to inhale through his mouth, he gagged on blood, and stopped crawling, and coughed a bloody froth. The four men watched him crawl and gag and cough. It was obvious his wound was mortal.
Deliberately therefore, Books drank the last of his wine, put down the glass, drew the Remington from his left-side holster, leaned over the bar, aimed the pistol, and shot Jay Cobb through the head.
He died instantly. The bullet was fired from above and from the rear, an oblique trajectory, at a range of seven feet. It penetrated the temporal bone above and forward of the ear, exposed the brain, passed through the brain, carrying with it segments of skull, and exited through the right orbit, or eye socket, taking off the ethmoid plate and the bridge of the nose. On the tile floor under what remained of Jay Cobb's face lay an eyeball and the brain matter which housed the accumulated knowledge of his twenty years, a grayish, adhesive slop of girls and kings and arithmetic and cows and prayer and mountains but primarily of how to fire a revolver accurately and hate himself and deliver milk and cream and butter.