His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  The silver ball-bearing almost rolled away. I heard it. So did he.

  The free hand clapped down on it.

  “Light the lamp,” he barked. “Now.”

  So I carefully moved, took up the matches. Lit one. The brief flare blinded me. I touched the lamp. Warm light flooded the room.

  Curtis Gregdon stared at me from over the barrel of his lone pistol. Underneath the brim of a lilting hat, he resembled more a child’s drawing of a man than a real one at all. His face was half-covered by a dirty bandage gone brown with old blood. In the three months it’d been since I’d clipped half of Curtis’s face with shot, he’d taken to the crusty facemask like a signature. “Uncap the whiskey. Put the bottle down. Step back. No bullshit, or I’ll put a hole through you, no hesitation.”

  Did as he asked. Had no intent to die over a bottle of hooch.

  He dropped the silver ball-bearing inside the bottle. It plopped into the amber fluid and clacked against the glass at the bottom. A wave of emptiness surged in my stomach. “No listening, no whispering in minds. No intrusions. Just you and me, Faust.”

  The black mouth of his pistol stayed firm on me. I said, “Ain’t the first time we’ve been this close with a gun between us, Curtis. This going to be the last?”

  “You don’t shut your smart-ass mouth it sure as hell might be.” His lip curled up to reveal a broken tooth. “I came to talk.”

  “You and I ain’t exactly friends, Curtis.”

  “Nobody else to talk to.”

  Bullets tell all truth. My brains were still intact. Was he lying with that gun of his? Eventually everybody’s wrong at least once. “I killed your brother, Curtis. Don’t think there’s much that I could say that you’d really give a shit about.”

  “It’s got no bearing on what tonight’s all about.”

  I jerked my chin toward the whiskey. “Is he watching?”

  “The whiskey’ll keep it asleep for the time being. Enough for you and me to do what we gotta do.” Curtis Gregdon reached back to where my tarnished shotgun leaned against the bars of the empty cell.

  I expected him to level it at me.

  Instead, he threw it over the desk. I snatched it out of the air.

  “Point it at me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I said just point it at me. I need you to.”

  “So you can have an excuse to put a round in my—”

  “Point it at me! Just point the goddamn thing at me so we can do this right, Faust.”

  I didn’t have much choice but to do what the man with the gun told me to.

  From the hip, I waved the barrels in his direction and wrenched back both hammers. With every passing second I saw the theatre of the moment in front of me: Curtis’s pistol wavered, so I shouldered the butt of the shotgun. “Lower the gun,” I said slowly, “or you and this shotgun can get intimately reacquainted with one another.”

  Curtis’s good eye flicked down to the side-by-side barrels in front of him. Relief flooded his mangled face.

  In the whiskey, the silver ball – the Eye – jumped, spun, and ricocheted like a loose bullet, tinking against the glass.

  “Ain’t nothing,” Curtis said. “Just spasms. The booze and the charm, they don’t like each other much.”

  I didn’t like this much. “Gun,” I said.

  “You ain’t serious.”

  “You told me to point at you, man. Trying to correct the fellow with the shotgun is not normal survival practice.”

  He pulled it out, turned the handle to me, and I took it.

  “You got a second one?” I asked.

  “You got my second one,” he said.

  “Cicero’s got your second one.”

  I cracked open my shotgun and draped it over my left arm with the two unused shells still winking from the breach. I half-cocked Gregdon’s .44, opened it at the top-break, and emptied the cartridges into my palm. I gave back the weapon. He took it with a frown. “You really gave my other gun to that fruitbasket?”

  “He earned it,” I said. “Curtis, you’re a fugitive of Blackpeak. Last time we encountered one another, you threatened my life in front of the whole town. You ain’t supposed to be here unless you’re locked up for hanging.”

  “Which is why I wanted you to point the gun at me. So you knew you was in control.”

  “You had to point a gun at me to do that?”

  “You would’a shot me the minute you saw me if I didn’t,” he reasoned.

  “Have faith.”

  “I do. If it walks, you shoot it. You wanna be marshal of a graveyard, Elias Faust, that’s damn fine by me, but I don’t plan to be in it.” He paced around behind my desk. Sometimes he gnawed on his nails, biting them bloody. “Truth is, this ain’t about turn-ins or hangings or any of that. Ain’t here to get hanged. I come as…as—” he tried to pull the word out of the air, “—a neutral party.” He picked up the whiskey bottle, shook it, and quieted the Eye. “I need to talk to you about things. We can’t do it here. Ears in the walls. People might be listening. Creepers in the dark,” he breathed. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Then where you supposed to be, Curtis?”

  “I’m ‘sposed to be hiding, but I can’t fuckin’ take it anymore, Faust. All this shit, it’s just digging into my head and it won’t let go.” With the bottle picked up in front of him, he jammed his face against the glass and leered at the dormant ball-bearing inside. Sometimes it jerked, leaped, last vestiges of life. “I need you to come with me. Marshal Faust, there’s things you gotta know. I can’t sit here with these thoughts in my brain anymore.”

  Struck me then that I’d never looked directly at the kid before. Behind blonde stubble and his coal-dirty face, he could have been someone. The poor bastard simpered in front of me like a shaved lamb.

  That’s when I saw it on his forehead: carved deep, still red, gleaming wet. A triangle.

  “I could choose not to help.” I rolled the .44 cartridges around in my palm. “I don’t have any obligation to you. I got too many issues with you. You got too many issues with me. You could be drawing me into a trap.”

  “It don’t matter if I am or if I’m not at this point, Elias. Because just by virtue of me walking through that door, I drew you in. Trap or not, the minute he knows where I am, he’ll send them to collect my ass.”

  “Send who?”

  Curtis fell still. “You know damn well,” he whispered. “You seen’em.”

  I flicked my gaze to the stilled Eye.

  Christ, even thinking of them – of them squatting on the buildings, of them around Keswick Everett’s mutilated corpse – threatened my evening meal.

  Knowingly, Curtis jerked his chin in a nod. “Sandshades.”

  Abruptly, a spark of movement suggested itself to me: I wanted that whiskey bottle. I wanted to shatter it. Maybe crash it across Gregdon’s chin. Maybe across the side of the desk. Get that sphere, hold it in my hand, feel the cool metal…

  Curtis slid the bottle to the edge of the desk, where he took it and set it on the floor beside his boot. “You’ll get it back soon enough. You feel it, don’t you? Bone deep. That’s the charm. The – the spell. Minute its invisible hands start squeezing your brain, they change how it works. Not in big ways, but subtle-like. You like it. You want it.”

  I imagined the Magnate’s voice coaxing itself out of the shadows of my mind.

  And you’ll get it, he would have said.

  “I need you clear,” Curtis told. “Clear the way I am. Clear as water.”

  “Your life in danger, Curtis?”

  That he didn’t respond and just stared off at the horizon on the edge of the desk told me everything I needed to know.

  “If I find that whatever it is you want to show me turns into a trick, a problem of some sort—“ I angled two fingers at his wrecked face, “—you’re first. Got it?”

  He blinked, swiped at his visible eye, and agreed. He looked a hundred years old. A thousand.

/>   I had half-a-mind to call Cicero out from underneath Nabby Lawson’s skirt to grade this boy’s acting ability. But instead I did the stupid thing: I trusted that little acorn of instinct in my gut instead of that hunk of logic in my skull. “I can help you,” I said. “Where the hell is this thing you feel compelled to show me?”

  “Thirty miles north. South of Crown Rock, just near the Western Elbow toward Rouseville. A shack. A little place don’t nobody else really know about ‘cept me and all the other Gregdons.”

  “Which means it’s a dangerous place for me.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna know you’re there, Faust. I can show you what I got to show you, tell you what I got to tell you, and we can go our separate ways. Then you and me never see one another again. Ain’t nothing left in Blackpeak for me. I go, and you and I act like we never knew each other.”

  “I’m supposed to forget everything else?”

  “I’m asking you to, Faust. A favor. Regardless of all that other bullshit.”

  People who ask for favors are usually the same ones won’t ever do you one back, and Curtis Gregdon was no different. Yet, sitting there in my longjohns, an outlaw in front of me and a half-living silver ball snapping away inside a bottle of whiskey, I thought about how much I could gain. If he held his word, I’d be free of a Gregdon. If things didn’t go the way he told me, I’d probably have to kill a Gregdon. Either way, the situation seemed like one that was going to end on the upswing.

  Just depended on how much I was willing to risk based on Gregdon’s vague invitation.

  He lifted the bottle up. He extended it to me. When my skin touched the glass, it gave out a soothing coolness. For all the times I’d left the damn Eye in my desk-drawer, I hadn’t been so desperate, so needful…

  It’d been mine, though. No matter where it was.

  “Please,” Curtis said.

  I needed him to leave Blackpeak. I’d give him the next few days. Least I could do for killing his brother.

  “Get in the cell,” I said. “I need to set some things in order before we go.”

  So I got dressed. I buckled on my holsters.

  Felt good. Felt normal. In Blackpeak, it’s good to have a gun. Just in case.

  I shook free my canvas duster from the office closet. Found my oiled hat. I took to the streets of Blackpeak. My boots got swallowed to the ankles in the puddles. Each raindrop felt like a pebble falling from the sky.

  Before my second knock, the door flew open, and Grady Cicero stared at me with his cheeks all flushed. His mutton-chops stood straight like a cat’s hackles. He was breathing really hard, peering at me from around the door. Several candles flickered behind him, some shorter than my thumbs and skirted with melted wax. “I’m a little hurt you didn’t invite me to your shindig,” I said.

  The door swung all the way open, and there stood Grady Cicero in a pair of short pants, shirtless enough just to show me how insignificant my own physique really was. He held his pistol and a cigarette. A short woman with yellow hair latched onto him like some kind of leech, sucking up and down on his chest. “Miss Lawson,” I said.

  “Elias Faust,” she said, standing from the floor to lean back against Cicero’s bear of a body, giving me full view of everything from the waist up. “Thought you might want to see what you interrupted.”

  “Something you need, Faust?” asked Cicero, easing the hammer down before he stuffed the .44 Russian into his pants.

  Miss Lawson giggled and bit a small tag of Cicero’s skin. “How ‘bout you invite him on in, Cissy? We can put on a show for the marshal, then give him a drink and some smoke.”

  “Something you need, Faust?” asked Cicero.

  “Who shit in your boots, Cicero?” I said.

  “Cute boots,” Miss Lawson said.

  “Miss Lawson, you mind giving Cicero and me a few minutes?”

  “Ain’t nothing you can say to him you can’t say to me, Marshal.”

  “Maybe not, but I’d prefer the illusion of privacy.”

  “I could just suck your dick while you talk,” she offered. She reared up and slapped one of her long-nailed hands across Cicero’s ass. Her feet tangled themselves drunkenly in her discarded blouse as she staggered toward the bed. She tried to pour a drink on the bedstand. She spilled half the brandy on the sheets.

  “Class act,” I said.

  “I’m not marrying her, Faust.”

  “Quality kind of man,” I said.

  “You’re a quality pain in my ass,” Cicero said, pulling the door almost all the way closed behind him as we stood in the hall. “Faust, can it wait until the sun?”

  “Not for me. For you, maybe. Striking out for a few days. Don’t know when I’ll be back exactly,” I said. “How’s Marshal Grady Cicero sound for the next several days?”

  “Fits,” he said. “Just not permanently.”

  “Need you to watch over things for awhile, sling lead if lead needs slinging, keep Poindexter’s bar from getting too much blood on it.”

  Miss Lawson shuffled around inside Cicero’s room. “Cissy?”

  “What?”

  “Get done out there,” she said. “You ain’t paying me just to drink.”

  He said to me, “I’ll handle Blackpeak, but I don’t have it in me to do it too long.”

  “Even if you’re getting paid?”

  “You know what I mean, Faust.” He leveled his eyes at me over the rims of his spectacles. “If you wanted help, I know you’d ask me. You come back in a pine crate dragged on a horse’s ass, though, and I might just celebrate. Get that through your thick-ass skull before you go do something like get a mouthful of bullets, yeah?”

  Miss Lawson interrupted again. “Cissy!”

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” I said.

  “In one piece,” he said.

  I thought about coming back in one piece as I walked to the stables. I thought about coming back in two or three. Might be able to survive that. Hard to tell, dealing with secrets coming from a Gregdon. The less pieces, the better. Two or three wouldn’t be so bad.

  In the gray morning Curtis and I packed our horses: coffee, beans, blankets, all mine. He stationed his foot on the stirrup and jumped up. His horse was just skin-and-bones. I slung a Winchester, checked my pistols, and saddle-holstered my shotgun. “You bringing a damn armory?” he asked.

  “I like to have lots of options. Your brother knows.”

  “No more talk about my brother, Faust.”

  “He tried to kill me, Curtis. You were there. You saw it.”

  “Don’t hold it over my fuckin’ head, alright?” he said, spitting over the side of his horse. “We ain’t always accountable for what our blood does, Elias Faust. You ever put it through your rabbit-shit brain that maybe blood don’t make all the bodies it’s in act the same?”

  “Gregdons are still Gregdons.”

  “Gregdons are still Gregdons, but I’m Curtis.” He yanked his reins hard and spurred his horse down the street, sloshing through the mud in front of me, leading the way.

  We didn’t talk. Gregdon was sour. He could lead the way and not talk to me once the whole trip toward the Western Elbow and I’d be perfectly happy with that.

  Wrapped in a rag soaked in whiskey, the Eye sat like a lead weight in my breast pocket.

  Close, but not too close.

  27

  By the time we were seven or eight miles out from Blackpeak, the downpour had turned into a mist. Come morning the sky was thick as smoke. The flatlands seemed endless, sprawling out on all sides. Gradually, ranges of hills and flat shale mountains rose up on either sides of us, formed from slanting rock and layered earth. The canyon must have been a riverbed a few thousand years back. Good path for horses. Makes it easy for them not to stray.

  Also makes it easy to get jumped on from onlookers above. At least, that’s what the corpse we found in the middle of our path reminded me.

  We drew our horses up on either side of the shadow. The rain pelted the dead
skin and had likely been doing so all night. Bloated and fat, the canine’s body was open to the elements, cut from chest to groin. Dark blood ran in a river between my horse’s hooves.

  “Dead dog,” said Curtis.

  “Coyote,” I said. “Spindly legs. Long nose. Big ears.” I leaned down, took a wary sniff. “Pretty new. Don’t stink yet. No big organs got cut.”

  Curtis must have seen me reach over and draw back the hammers of my shotgun where it hung at my saddle’s side. “Tense, Red Riding Hood?” he asked.

  “Not too familiar with the wilds, Curtis. I usually don’t get much of a chance to travel.”

  When he grinned, half of it disappeared behind his face-wrap. “Big bad Marshal Faust shakin’ in his boots about a dead dog and a bit of blood.”

  “It’s been cut longways. That normal to you?”

  “Rough area around here, Faust. Used to be Apache grounds. Now it’s lawless land. Cults, zealots, runaways.”

  I tried to ignore the prickling feeling of eyes on the back of my neck or the way I shifted to make my Colts more accessible to my hands. “That don’t explain the coyote body.” As unsettled as I was about Gregdon being my only key to surviving a bunch of pissed ne’er-do-wells staking claim to the wilderness, it wasn’t them that bugged me. Something else… “What you trade these undesirables for passage through this place, Curtis?”

  “Guns we take, shit we steal.”

  “And the Gregdons get free rein?”

  “Information and knowledge. Cooperation, and if necessary, some of their help. They got the whole damn world mapped out, seems like,” Curtis said. He looked up along the slopes. “And the Well. Some of them know where the Well is.”

  I gnawed on a piece of dried meat. It hit my stomach like steel. “The hell’s so important about a well?”

  Underneath his dripping hat, he had the look of a kid who’d shared a secret he wasn’t meant to – expecting leverage, perhaps, or praise. “I take it Mayor Kallum’s not been very forthcoming, has he? I met some oblivious bastards in my time, Elias Faust, but I think you might be among the worst. You know what my old man would say about you? That’s the short-sightedness biting you in the ass. How you ‘spect to live into the future if you can’t see the present?”