The Devil's Snare

by Tony Healey

  Before Myra could answer or attempt to get herself free, Ethan appeared behind Jack Denton. “I got a gun,” he said, followed by the audible click of the hammer on his pistol being thumbed into position. “Care to test my aim, Denton? Or are you thinkin’ at this close range, I couldn’t miss anyways? I mean, with my gun pressed up against your back the way it is, I don’t think a blind man could miss.”

  Denton did not immediately turn around. He smiled at Myra as he released her. “Your guardian angel always appears, doesn’t he?”

  “He has a habit of doing that, yes,” she said.

  Ethan said, “Turn around slowly. Hands where I can see them.”

  Denton raised his hands slightly and turned to face Ethan, who held his pistol in one hand and a cloth sack of coffee beans in the other. “I did not see you go into the general store.”

  “I’m quick on my feet,” Ethan said. “Now, is there something we can help you with? Don’t want to hold you up from whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “I was collecting my son from the jail.”

  “Is that right?”

  Denton folded his arms. “Seems he got knocked out cold last night after I left the saloon. You wouldn’t happen to know anythin’ about that, would you?”

  “How’s about we quit the games and get to the point,” Ethan said, squinting in the sunlight.

  Denton shrugged. “Sounds good to me. You want to get to the point, well, here it is. I got a score to settle with you, friend, and the sooner it’s done, the better for all involved.”

  “Name a time and a place,” Ethan said.

  One side of Denton’s mouth lifted in a sneer. “Tonight. Here outside the saloon. Let’s see this done.”

  “Very well,” Ethan said. “Nine o’clock suit ya?”

  Denton offered his hand. “Nine it is.”

  Ethan looked at the hand offered him, then up into Denton’s eyes. “We’re done here.”

  “You know, you do look like your father. It’s almost uncanny, really. Like looking at him all those years ago. Before he left, of course. Back when he was any good to people.”

  Ethan dropped the sack of coffee beans on the ground, stepped back and drew his other pistol. He now had both pointed toward Jack Denton in broad daylight. “I said we’re done here. Don’t make it so you don’t live to see what happens come nine.”

  Denton moved away, hands up. “I’m going, boy. But rest assured I know precisely what’ll happen right here on this very street. It’ll be your blood mixed with the mud. How it ought to be.” With a sarcastic salute, he walked away.

  “Ethan, don’t let him win,” said Myra. “Kill him now and you’re just a murderer. He’ll have the last laugh as you swing. You know he will.”

  Ethan grimaced as he watched Denton recede. “Holding back on pulling these triggers is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. . . .”

  Myra lifted the sack of coffee beans and placed them in the other side of the saddlebag. “You know, we’ll need this coffee tonight if we’re doing what you suggested.”

  “It’ll keep us sharp,” Ethan said, holstering his weapons. “Besides, it has to be tonight now. He’s set the time.”

  He looked across at the sheriff’s office and saw Deputy Mitchell standing in the window, looking directly at him.

  Ethan raised his hand.

  The deputy signaled back.

  “Got all the ammo?” Ethan asked Myra as he unhitched Ruby.

  “I did. Do you think we’ll need it?”

  Ethan climbed into the saddle, then assisted Myra in getting up behind him. “I like to think some things, violence included, are inevitable as rain.”

  “I don’t care much for the analogy,” Myra said. “Sounds like hell to me.”

  “That works, too.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When Jack Denton got to where the horses had been hitched, Bobby’s was missing.

  “Damn kid!” he yelled. Regaining his composure, he removed his hat and ran his fingers through his sweaty hair, trying to maintain his cool. Looking about, he could see no sign of Bobby or the horse. They were good as gone.

  Wherever he’s run off to, I’m just about finished picking up the pieces and saving his sorry backside, Denton thought angrily. Let him rot in a jail cell next time.

  He got onto his horse and headed out of town. Looking behind him, he saw Ethan and Myra headed the opposite way, their ride kicking up dust as it sped off. He briefly considered following them and springing a surprise attack, but he had something better in mind.

  Nine at night, Ethan had said. Well, Jack Denton had never been a gunslinger. He’d never been quick off the draw. In a contest with Ethan, Denton knew he would be outdrawn and shot. It’d be stupid to meet Ethan alone. But Ethan would probably be expecting him to bring backup.

  An idea occurred to him. Something so much better—something Ethan Harper would not expect. And with Ethan out of the way, he could get to Myra. She could follow Ethan to hell as far as he was concerned. In fact, he’d happily put her there himself.

  It was high time people remembered him as the devil incarnate. They’d forgotten somehow. It was not a good thing. Before leaving town completely, he made a circuit but saw no sign of Bobby anywhere, so he continued on his way without him.

  Damn him.

  Damn the town and everyone in it.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sheriff Henry Abernathy rode through the front entrance of the Denton ranch, expecting a welcoming committee and finding none. The place was quiet. It was big—several buildings, a couple of barns. Jack Denton’s land stretching on for miles and miles. Every piece of it bought over the years he’d lived outside of Amity Creek. Some of it through dubious means, though Abernathy had never been able to prove as such. He followed the rough dirt road toward the main house and called out in greeting, but no one came. The windmill to his right turned lazily in the breeze, the cry of its rusted axle the only sound occupying all that space.

  Abernathy climbed down, knees popping the moment his boots hit the ground.

  In the depths of winter, his joints sometimes felt they were frozen all the way through, and he’d have to walk about some to ease them up. To thaw his mechanics, like some ancient timepiece that had been left out in the elements.

  The sheriff cast about for signs of movement but did not see any. He checked his pistol and slipped it back into the holster at his side. Digging into his saddlebag, he took a handful of extra shells and stuffed them into his pants pocket. You never know. That was what his daddy had told him all the time. Always be prepared, son. No telling what’s coming. Lord, how long had it been since his father had passed? Abernathy didn’t rightly know. A long time, that was certain. In the ground but not forgotten. He’d often wondered if the same would be true of himself. At some point you stopped counting the years and let them blur into one big tapestry of jumbled memories. Everyone he’d lost along the way, the experiences he’d had—all of them were parts of that tapestry. One day the tapestry would be finished, he knew, and all that would be left were those images of the past.

  Abernathy approached the main house and knocked on the door. No answer came. He tried the handle; it turned freely in his hand, and he eased the door open. Peering inside, he called out, “Hello?”

  He saw nothing, heard nothing. No sign of life inside at all.

  “Damn . . . ,” he muttered under his breath as he walked through the ground floor of the house, checking each room, the house silent and eerie around him. He had to remind himself to breathe. The house, too, seemed like it was holding its breath and waiting for something to happen.

  Abernathy exited through the back door and crossed to one of the barns. He had a quick look inside. Nothing but horseshoeing equipment, farming tools. Simple hammers and saws used to mend fences. A man like Dent
on, with all that land, had a lot of fence to care for.

  Standing for a moment in the sunshine, Abernathy wondered where everyone might be. He looked at the second barn and thought to try his luck there. What he was looking for, however, was a Russian giant. He almost chuckled to himself at the idea that Denton employed a giant—and a Russian one at that! But as ridiculous as it seemed, the sheriff knew he had to treat it seriously. If his deputy said a thing was so, then he had to consider that to be correct. Boyd Mitchell was no liar.

  Abernathy pushed the barn door open. There were several horses stabled there of varying breeds, sizes and colors. He walked past them in turn, checking them out, pausing at a pale yellow mare at the end. She was familiar to him somehow, but he couldn’t place her . . . and then he could.

  The sheriff leaned on the gate and called her over. “Hey there, Clover. Come ’ere, girl,” he said, coaxing her toward him. The mare didn’t hesitate to approach and allowed Abernathy to pet her and stroke the wide bridge of her nose. “What’re you doin’ here, huh, girl?”

  How had one of Glendon Hart’s horses ended up here in Jack Denton’s barn? He knew the mare from the couple of times he’d paid Hart’s place a visit for one thing or another. There weren’t many mares of that color in town, either. Not as fair and golden hued as Clover.

  The barn door opened behind him. Abernathy whirled about. The silhouette of a woman stood in the doorway, a black shape in a rectangle of daylight. Abernathy’s hand rested on his pistol. “Howdy.”

  The woman didn’t move and, for a moment, didn’t speak. She just looked at him. Abernathy wished his old eyes would adjust to the light a little quicker so he could make her out.

  But then she said, “Can I help you?”

  He raised a hand in greeting and moved away from Clover. “Sheriff Abernathy.”

  “How do you do, Sheriff?”

  “Fine, fine,” he said, cautiously crossing the barn toward her. “Is Jack about?”

  The woman smiled. “He’s at the main house, actually. He just got back.”

  “He did? I went through there, didn’t see anybody.”

  “Like I said, he just got back. As in a few minutes ago.”

  Abernathy considered this. It wasn’t impossible, though he hadn’t heard any horses approaching from a distance. But the barn structure could’ve shielded the sound. He decided that, all told, he didn’t have much to lose by going to the house and seeing for himself if Jack had returned. After all, what did the woman have to gain from lying to him?

  “Best not to keep him waiting,” she said. “Jack is a busy man. He gets . . . tetchy.”

  Abernathy smiled at the word. “Tetchy. I like it. Lead on, sister.”

  He exited the barn and followed the woman across to the house. She didn’t wait on him but strode confidently ahead. Abernathy’s gaze was drawn to the shifting of her legs and buttocks beneath the blue-and-white-striped dress she wore. She was at least thirty years younger than he, but it didn’t stop him looking. Even disillusioned old men could appreciate a beautiful behind when they saw one. So long as that was as far as things went. There was something familiar about the woman, but he couldn’t place her. She had an impressive amount of hair, stark red in color, but unusually for a redhead, her skin was quite tanned. The woman opened the back door of the house and held it open for him. “He’s just in here,” she said invitingly.

  Abernathy tipped his hat at her. “Much obliged, miss.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  Abernathy entered the house once more. His eyes adjusted to the change from bright sunlight to a darkened interior again. He barely had time to react to the ax that landed in his stomach. He looked down, then to his right. A woman identical to the one who’d just shown him back to the house stood to the side of the doorway, hands wrapped around the handle of the ax so tightly, her knuckles had turned white. I bet they use that thing for chopping firewood, he thought absently.

  The woman yanked the ax free. Abernathy felt something within go twang like an elastic band, then loosen. Within seconds, the front of his clothes were saturated in hot blood pumping from the open wound. The sheriff staggered backwards, heels of his boots catching the threshold, sending him sprawling out the door. He tried to stop himself, but his hands clutched at empty air, and he hit the ground hard. Abernathy’s hands went to his torso, feeling for the wound. Blood ran fast and loose over his fingers as he pressed at the injury. It was big. Oh, no. This is it, he told himself. This is how it ends.

  Abernathy looked up. The woman had multiplied yet again, and now three identical faces were staring down at him dispassionately, their eyes empty and devoid of emotion. One held the ax. One wore the blue-and-white-striped dress he’d been appreciating. The third woman somehow looked more intelligent, her eyes sharper.

  He glanced at the head of the ax. Blood dripped from the worn cutting edge. His blood. Abernathy watched it fall, drop by drop, and his mind traveled back through the tapestry of his life to when he was a child watching his mother gut a rabbit. The blood drip-drip-dripping from its hanging open carcass.

  One by one the women removed their wigs. They spoke amongst themselves, but he could not understand their words. The sheriff knew that the fault was his, not theirs. He wasn’t making sense to himself. He tried to kick himself backward to get away from them, but they merely followed him until he ran out of energy and could no longer propel his tired old body backward across the turf.

  Abernathy felt the cold reaching his extremities. His legs and fingers tingled. He pictured himself reaching for his pistol, pulling it free of the holster and at least getting to pull the trigger. Make some kind of effort to fight back. But he couldn’t move his arms. Couldn’t do much of anything, in fact, but look at the women towering over him, getting bigger and bigger by the second. “Please, send for Dr. Murphy,” he said, and he heard his voice, clear as day, but the words themselves seem to fall over one another in their haste to get out.

  Instantly, he scolded himself. Were those to be his last words, then? Begging for help? What an end to a long life. He wished he’d said something more profound, but then he guessed that the dying rarely got to give stirring speeches. People just died and that was that. You breathed your last, and the wind took you away. That was how it worked. That was how it had always worked. All that remained was the damned tapestry, and what good would that do?

  The one with the intelligent eyes spoke. Just gibberish to his ears. The sister with the ax lifted it, weighed it in her hands, and moved it toward his forehead to set her mark. He felt its edge press lightly against his skin and thought, In a second, that will come down and I won’t even feel it. She hoisted the ax, ready to make the strike.

  Abernathy felt the breeze. The sister in the blue-and-white-striped dressed grinned at him, as if he were about to witness a beautiful thing. As if they were about to gift him a surprise. He found the expression she wore alluring, like easing into a body of warm water and then sinking into the black depths below.

  Without fear now. The tapestry of his life nearly complete.

  In one powerful movement, the sister with the ax swung it down, her aim sure and true. The blade rose, curved overhead and fell toward him. Abernathy sucked in one last breath, just as the ax struck. And his last thought was to wonder who would get his badge.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mikhail looked at the blood and winced. May Proctor scowled at him, her hands on her hips. “What’re you scared of? It’s just blood.”

  Randy Nillson whistled. “A lot of blood.”

  “I am not scared,” Mikhail said.

  “Well, you’re looking pretty peaky from where I’m standing, big boy,” May said.

  Mikhail lifted Abernathy under the armpits and Randy lifted the old man’s legs. Between the two men, they carried the sheriff away.

  “Remember to st
rip him off and burn him up good. Don’t leave no evidence, you two!”

  Neither man answered her.

  “You’ve got blood over that nice dress,” said June.

  “What?” May exclaimed, looking down at herself. “Oh, hell. So I have!”

  “Best change.”

  “I know that. What do you think I am, an idiot?” May snapped, stomping into the house.

  June looked down at the grass. The blood everywhere. Lord, what a mess. Couldn’t be helped, she supposed. Better than shooting the sheriff and running the risk of alerting anyone near the ranch that a gun had been fired.

  His death had not been clean, but it had been quick. Merciful, too. June had watched a lot of men die over the years. Many did not pass with grace and acceptance. They did not allow themselves to slip away; they fought what was coming. They clung on as long as they could, making it worse for themselves.

  The sheriff had died in seconds. She felt good about killing him like that. And he hadn’t looked scared. She respected the old geezer for that, at least. Even if he was the law—the one thing she truly hated.

  April had been silently cleaning the ax off, and now she gave June a meaningful look.

  “What’re you staring at?” June asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  “Spit it out, April.”

  Her sister stopped cleaning the head of the ax. “Jack’s not gonna be happy we did this. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Well, Jack don’t have to like it. Deed’s done now, ain’t it? Can’t go sew the man’s head up and send him on his way good as new.”

  “That ain’t what I mean and you know it.”

  June shook her head in distaste. “We don’t run everything by him. That’s not the arrangement. That sheriff might’ve found something here he didn’t like, started snooping about some more, found something incriminating. Next thing you know, our arrangement is good as dead. Got it? We killed that old fool to protect what we got and what we’re gonna have when we see this through.”