by Rory Black
‘They call me Iron Eyes,’ the gaunt creature snarled in a low almost toneless voice. ‘The poster said “Dead or Alive”, Carter. I always prefer the first choice.’
As Frank Carter made one last attempt to rise from his position, two deafening shots blasted from the Navy Colts and ripped what was left of his body apart. Without a second’s hesitation the Colts were replaced in the two-inch thick leather belt around Iron Eyes’ middle as the tall man leaned over and grabbed Carter’s bloodstained shirt collar.
It was a startled deputy sheriff who stood clutching his scattergun as he watched the terrifying sight that approached him. The lawman stood frozen outside the small, sod, sheriff’s office watching as the bounty hunter dragged his prey towards him.
This was no normal man who dropped the still warm body at his feet, thought the terrified deputy sheriff Jim George had seen a lot of gunfighters and vermin in his days as a lawman, but the sight of the tall, emaciated appearance before him chilled his mature bones to their marrow. He had an idea who this killing machine might be but was not keen to ask the killer awkward questions. George had lived a lot longer than most sheriffs by being shrewd enough to know when to keep his lip buttoned.
‘Frank Carter,’ Iron Eyes said in a low, menacing voice, as he pulled out the creased Wanted poster from his bullet-filled coat pocket. ‘I claim the reward.’
The sheriff accepted the stained poster and shook it so that it unfolded. ‘I’ll have to wire your claim. It might take a while before I get authorization to get the bank to pay you.’
‘I got plenty of time.’ Iron Eyes gave a sideways glance at the telegraph office that was halfway down the street, then nodded and turned and started to walk towards the hotel. The lawman felt a sudden rush of relief surging through his veins as his eyes trailed the long-legged man.
Only when Iron Eyes had entered the interior of the hotel did the sheriff start to breathe normally once more.
The bounty hunter moved towards the hotel desk at a pace that was deliberate and almost silent. He moved like a mountain cat with a grace that belied his sheer inhumanity towards anything or anyone else. Iron Eyes rested his thin hands upon the desk and waited for the shaking clerk to look up at him. Finally the small timid man gathered enough nerve together to cast his eyes up into the dark, dirty face. It was a cruel face that stared back at him. A face with scars and penetrating eyes the colour of bullets. The long black hair hung limply like strands of lifeless weeds and masked part of the expressionless face.
‘Room.’
The clerk nodded frantically as he dug out the register from a pile of paper behind him before placing it before the quiet man. It was a burning stare that met the sight of the register and then picked up the long nibbed pen out of the inkwell.
For a second the bounty hunter just held the pen in his right hand as the ink dripped onto the wooden desk. Then as quickly as he was able to draw his weapons, Iron Eyes smashed the sharp pen down into the hand of the clerk. A mixture of blood and ink seeped from the hand as the clerk doubled up in agony.
‘Just give me a key,’ Iron Eyes demanded as the clerk pulled his hand to chest and nervously did as he was instructed.
The ghost of a man took the key and then moved to the stairs that lay to his right. Halfway up the steep, carpeted incline, he paused long enough to turn and utter a few words down to the bleeding man. ‘Better get a doc to look at that, mister.’
The clerk waited until Iron Eyes had made the landing of the first floor before doing just that.
The sheriff was making his way down to the telegraph office slowly when he noticed the hotel clerk running like a scalded cat in the direction of the doctor’s house. The lawman had been around for longer than even he liked to remember and knew that if he was to get close to the next election he had to stay away from the stranger. That was no normal bounty hunter in the hotel, he thought. That was no normal man.
Deputy Sheriff Jim George knew that if he were to keep the killing in Tombstone down to a minimum, he had to play this situation by ear. It was not the way he had learned to do his job when he pinned a star on his chest for the first time twenty years earlier, but that was the way he was going to play this. Sometimes a man has to do what tastes bad, just in order to remain whole and without any additional ventilation holes.
Tombstone’s mature lawman had been around for too long and had seen his share of gunmen passing through, but this tall man who resembled a skeleton with skin was something very different to George’s experienced eyes. The thought that this bounty hunter might just decide to start giving other Tombstone residents a closer look and claiming further rewards sent a cold chill down the man’s spine. This was a town that welcomed the folks that other respectable towns rejected. There had to be at least a dozen wanted souls within the town limits at any one time.
‘Jim.’ Clancy Green the telegraph operator greeted the pale-faced man as he entered the small wooden office.
‘Clancy.’ George returned the greeting and dragged a chair across the dusty floor before resting his bones in it. ‘I want you to send me a couple of wires.’
A couple of wires?’ The telegraph man started to smile as he considered the fact that he was about to double the weekly average of wires sent from his small office in one single day ‘How come you want to send two wires?’
‘I got me a bounty hunter who is claiming a reward on somebody he just blowed apart in the saloon,’ George started. ‘The other wire is more of an enquiry’
‘Enquiry?’ Greene’s face started to have an air of curiosity written across it as he sat down next to the seldom used telegraph equipment. ‘What sort of enquiries you thinking of making, Jim?’
Jim George waved his wrinkled hand over the equipment on the desk and smiled. ‘Just get me a few scraps of paper and a pencil, Clancy. I gotta find out where the county sheriff is ’cause I might just require his help.’
‘Something must be brewing, Jim,’ Clancy pulled his pencil from behind his ear and handed it across to the worried man.
‘I got a feeling something is brewing, and it ain’t tea.’ Jim George licked the end of the pencil before looking down at the scrap of paper before him. Sweat trickled down from under the rim of his Stetson.
Evening came suddenly over Tombstone as the sounds of the howling wind swept across from the surrounding hills determinedly up onto the treeless plateau where the fast growing town lay defiantly The curious figure of Iron Eyes slept in his hotel room with his two Navy Colts at either side of him. The man lay fully dressed upon the bed linen propped up by four pillows. His only concession to normality was to remove two long, vicious spurs from his mule-ear boots. The boots had stayed upon his feet though. The long coat hung on a hook that was crudely nailed to a chunk of wood on the wall next to the window. Before retiring, Iron Eyes had moved the large bed so that it faced the door before sliding the bolt across. Sleep came easily to the trail weary man who had made a profession out of hunting humans in the manner usually reserved for animals.
Iron Eyes had made the long ride from Texas up to the windy climate that had spawned Tombstone in the heart of cattle land. The surrounding hills were rich with silver and when men are getting rich by digging ore they require the basics of life. Food, whiskey women and tools, in various orders of preference. This was a troubled land where the mixture of so many differing sorts had lit many fuses that could blow up at any time. Iron Eyes’ instincts had brought him here because that was where he knew Frank Carter had headed. Here there were many of his sort.
Killers felt safe within the town limits of the fledgling Tombstone.
It had been a long hard ride that had tested the grit of the bounty hunter to its very limits. Iron Eyes had ridden into Dodge City in Kansas a month earlier and after shooting up the town a mite was directed to the distant Tombstone.
Nearly 750 miles across hard range had slowed the relentless Iron Eyes. Sagebrush as high as a horse’s breastbone made progress slow but he had continued
. Any sane man would have quit for an easier victim, but Iron Eyes lacked a grip on a normal man’s sanity. To him, he had started to pursue his chosen prey and that drove him on like a hound when the scent of a raccoon gets into its nostrils. Quitting would never even dawn on the long lethal creature who slept peacefully in the soft hotel bed. Dreams never visited his slumber as he usually slept with open eyes. Dreams were for those with imagination, Iron Eyes had none.
Nightmares often came into the heart of his mind, but he did not require sleep for their visitation.
The rapping upon the door brought him out of the deep sleep suddenly. His hand gripped the two Navy Colts as his eyelids opened just wide enough to study the door that faced him. Without uttering a word he rose and stepped onto the board flooring silently. Iron Eyes then stood and moved to the door cautiously as any man would who had lived so close to death as he had done. The years of living like an animal had honed his attitudes and shaped his every lungful of air. He had lost most of his humanity over the years of dishing out his special form of justice, if there had been any humanity dwelling in his soul at all. The bounty hunter leaned against the door and pressed his head at its faded paintwork as he listened. The firm knocking came again. It was not the knock of a man’s knuckles; it sounded far too gentle to the trained hunter.
‘You in there?’ The voice was feminine to a degree although it had a strength to its tones that intrigued him. Females seldom, if ever, visited the strange, gaunt man to offer their favours, as they would to less terrifying figures, so Iron Eyes was intrigued.
‘Who is it?’ Iron Eyes asked carefully. He did not want to end up as dead as Frank Carter by finding the man had a lover with a gun and a grudge.
‘Open the door,’ the voice demanded powerfully.
Iron Eyes stuffed one of his pistols into his belt whilst cooking the hammer back on the other.
Whoever this female was she had a power in her voice that fired the strange man’s fancy to such a degree that he slid the bolt and opened the door.
The female who stood before him lacked anything in the way of looks that might appeal to the average man, however long they had been in the saddle. She was a mere five feet in height in her high-heeled riding boots and had black hair cut shorter than most men. Her complexion was dark and ruddy and seemed closer to chewed leather than female flesh. Her clothing bore signs of wear that few garments ever reached and her britches were made of shiny leather that had been stitched up more than `once. Apart from her bosom that strained unaided against the thick cotton shirt she looked like a man. Her face showed signs that she had been hit on the nose more than once and when she spoke Iron Eyes could see gaps where teeth used to dwell. She seemed to resemble a prize fighter more than anything else the tall man could think of He had seen many odd people in his days, but she was the most unusual critter he had ever come close to. Yet for all that he felt an affinity with her because she, like himself, was an outsider.
The woman walked in calmly and looked him up and down. ‘What they call you?’ she demanded.
‘Iron Eyes,’ the lean man replied, as he circled her trying to make out whether or not she was what she appeared to be. ‘Who the hell are you?’
The belly laugh that roared out from her small body via her larger than average mouth took the grim-faced man by surprise, as he stepped back clutching his Navy Colt. ‘My name is Squirrel Tooth Annie,’ she boomed, showing the tooth that was in the centre of her mouth and far longer than it ought to have been.
Iron Eyes used his free hand to rub his eyes as he watched the woman as she sat down upon his bed and bounced as if testing the springs.
‘Squirrel Tooth Annie?’
She boomed another loud laugh that seemed to bounce off all four walls before hitting his ears. ‘I heard of you, Iron Eyes. They say that you are one hell of a bastard. Is it true?’
The bounty hunter moved silently across the room and sat on the sill of the window before lowering his gun. ‘I guess it is. What difference does that make to you?’
‘None. You heard of me'?’ she asked, in a voice that seemed to have too much volume for someone of her size. ‘Ever heard of old Squirrel Tooth Annie?’
Iron Eyes shrugged as if uncertain. ‘What the hell do you want of me, Squirrel Tooth Annie?’
Annie raised her index finger and pointed at him. ‘You sure you ain’t heard tell of me?’
‘You a town crier?’ He had not intended to be humorous as it was not in his nature, but she laughed again and almost split his head with the sheer noise of her cackling.
As quickly as she had started to laugh, she ceased and then with a face that was as straight as any seen at a prayer meeting started to move towards him. For the first time in a long while the hardened bounty hunter found himself feeling uneasy He still had his gun cocked but she was unarmed. Yet, as she edged closer to him with her small steps, sweat started to trickle down the back of his neck.
‘I seen what you done to old Frank Carter.’
Annie stood staring into his grey, dead eyes. ‘I can use a varmint like you.’
Iron Eyes uncocked his Navy Colt and slid it into his belt over his hip. ‘I ain’t for hire. I’m a bounty hunter, nothing else.’
‘You’re damn good with them Colts, Iron Eyes.’
She grinned as best her sparse teeth would permit. ‘You’ll do for me.’
‘Do what exactly?’
She started to boom again. It was like being in a room with a thundercloud that just would not go away.
PICCADILLY PUBLISHING
To visit our website, click here
To visit our blog, click here