by Jory Sherman
“I ain’t dead yet, Zane,” Pope rasped. His finger tightened on the trigger.
Lew’s hand flashed toward his holster like a diving hawk. In a blur of speed, he jerked the Colt free, thumbing the hammer back as he brought it to bear on Pope.
Pope struggled to pull the trigger. Sweat beaded up in the furrows on his forehead. His hand shook from pain and weakness. He gritted his teeth with the effort, as blood continued to stream from his gut. Finally, the trigger depressed and the pistol boomed, spewing out flame and sparks and hot lead.
At the same time, Lew fired his pistol, taking direct aim on an imaginary spot in the middle of Pope’s forehead. The Colt bucked in his hand and he threw himself sideways. Pope’s bullet shot past him and went into the main showroom of the hardware store. There was a thunk and then the sound of breaking glass as the bullet caromed off a plow blade and smashed through the front window.
Pope’s forehead sprouted a blue-black hole and the back of his head exploded like a pie plate smashed with a rock. Brain matter flew like pasty cotton in all directions and the hole in his forehead sprouted a crimson flower. His eyes frosted over with the glaze of death and his neck sagged as all feeling went out of him. His head hit the floor with a resounding thud, and the blood from his forehead stopped flowing.
A pall of gray smoke hung in the air, swirled around the lighted lamp on the cluttered desk. Lew stood there, shaking inwardly, his thoughts scrambled, confused. Killing Canby might have been an accident, but he had shot Pope right in the middle of his forehead without giving it a second thought. What had happened to him? Was it just animal instinct? A struggle for survival? He had killed again and there was no question in his mind that he had meant to put Pope’s lamp out. Permanently.
“Lew—are you—are you all right?” Seneca asked, still frozen, standing stiffly in front of the chair that had been her prison.
“I—I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I guess I got buck fever.”
“Buck fever?”
“I just killed a man, Seneca. It feels like the floor just dropped out from under me. It’s an awful feeling.”
She walked over to him, grabbed his arm with both hands. She squeezed him in an attempt to offer reassurance.
“He tried to kill you, Lew. You were just defending yourself.”
Her words didn’t help. He knew she wouldn’t understand. That shot he had made had been deadly accurate. He had taken another human life and it was making his insides crawl, as if he had swallowed a gallon jug of spiders.
“Let’s get out of here, Seneca.” He holstered his pistol. “I’ll take you back home.”
She shivered against him and released her grip on his arm.
“I can’t wait to see Daddy. I can’t believe all this happened. Are you sure Virgil’s dead? What about Mr. Canby?”
“He’s dead, too. Come on. Let’s go out the back and get your horse. Mine’s out there, too.”
Just then, they heard a crash out front as if someone was kicking the door in. There was a tinkle of glass and then they heard footsteps. Cautious footsteps, as if someone had just stepped inside.
Lew pushed Seneca around behind him.
“Wait here,” he whispered.
He walked over to the wall and peered around it.
There, in the front of the store, stood the sheriff. Billy Jim Colfax. And he had a sawed-off double-barreled Greener in his hand. The shattered glass door hung open, gaping into the night.
Lew eased his pistol out of his holster. It barely made a sound.
Colfax went into a crouch.
“Luke? You back there?” Colfax’s voice made a hollow echo in the empty store.
Lew didn’t answer.
“Virgil? You get Zane?”
Lew waited, holding his breath.
“Zane, if that’s you back there, I’m going to take you down.”
“You go to hell, Billy Jim,” Lew said. “Virgil and Luke are dead. If you’re their hired gun, you’re breaking the law if you come after me. It was self-defense.”
“Zane, nobody would have to pay me to kill your ass, you sonofabitch. You’re just another varmint taking up room in my town.”
“Make your play, Billy Jim. Or crawl back in your hole.”
“Zane, you’re a dead man.”
Colfax opened up with the Greener. He triggered two quick shots, aiming right where Zane stood behind the wall between the storeroom and showroom.
The twin explosions made a huge sound in the empty room.
Seneca whimpered behind Lew and put her hands to her ears.
In that instant, Lew knew what he had to do. And he knew he had to do it fast.
6
TWO LOADS OF DOUBLE-OUGHT BUCKSHOT RIPPED INTO THE back wall of the store. To Lew, it sounded like the entire wall was going to collapse and fall on him. Splinters of wood leaped into the air. The wall groaned. None of the shot penetrated all the way through, but shot came through the opening and splattered the back of the storeroom, sounding like hail as it pinged off metal objects.
Colfax dropped the shotgun and went for his pistol.
Lew stepped out from behind the shattered wall, thumbed back the hammer on his Colt, and leveled it at Colfax. The pistol exploded and kicked upward. Lew brought it back down, hammered back, and sent another slug straight at Colfax. With the lamplight at his back, it was difficult for him to see. He hammered back again, ready to shoot if Colfax’s pistol cleared its holster.
Colfax took the bullet low on his hip. The force of the projectile spun him around in a half circle. He jerked his pistol from its holster in a purely reflexive action, cocking it on the draw. He went into a crouch and fired at Lew as he attempted to recover and find solid footing for legs that were already going weak from shock and loss of blood. The roar of his pistol boomed through the showroom. Billows of smoke rose from both pistols and hung in the air like a ghostly pall in the half-light.
Colfax fired again, but his aim was not true, and the bullet went wild, smashing into a shelf full of tin flashing, the ricochet bursting open a keg of tenpenny nails that rattled on the floor like metallic rain. Lew hammered back and fired another round at Colfax, but the sheriff had moved and the bullet whistled past him and struck the store window, shattering it to a jumble of tinkling shards.
Again, Colfax fired, but he was moving to a dark corner, shooting on the run, and his bullet plowed a furrow in the floor six inches from Lew’s foot, sending splinters into his right shin. Lew fired again at the running man, but failed to lead him far enough. The bullet whined out of the store through the shattered window and caromed off a bell across the street with a loud thwong that quickly died away in the torrent of rainfall.
Colfax reached the corner, braced himself, and held his pistol up with two hands, trying to get a bead on Lew. Lew strode deeper into the darkness off to his right, fired another round at the place where he thought Colfax would be. He had an afterimage glowing in his head from the orange flash of Colfax’s pistol, but the minute he fired, he knew that Colfax was no longer there. The bullet thudded into the slat side of a wooden wheelbarrow and mushroomed into a lead pellet that fell, spent and mashed, onto to the lid of a paint can.
Seneca, her knees quivering, her legs shaking, dropped to the floor and crawled over to the desk. She pulled the chair away and crawled underneath into that cramped space. She drew her knees up to her chin until she was in the shape of a ball. She continued to tremble, her eardrums vibrating with the sound of the explosions.
Lew crouched down behind the skeletal frame of a moldboard plow, his eyes narrowed to slits. He stared at the corner where Colfax had gone, looking for any sign of movement. He waited for the next flash from the sheriff’s gun, his finger tight on the trigger, squeezing it just enough to take out the slack. There wasn’t much. He knew he had a trigger pull of less than three pounds.
But Colfax didn’t fire his pistol. Nor did he move.
Both me
n seemed to freeze in the shadows, neither willing to make the first move. The seconds crawled by. The silence grew like a massive presence in the darkness, amid the din of rain and wind. The pelting rain muffled all sounds of breathing. Each man, and Seneca, could feel the boards in the walls reverberate from the sound of the rain drumming on the shingled roof, a relentless pounding that echoed in the chamber of the showroom.
Sweat beaded up on Lew’s forehead. His palms began to moisten, and he had an itch over his left eyebrow that he did not dare to scratch. There was madness in that empty room now, a madness born of the incessant patter of raindrops on the roof, the outside walls. Each person became aware of the wind. It blew through the shattered front windows, streamed along the floor in a chilling updraft, and whistled over plows and wheelbarrows, rattled the hanging hoes and rakes and shovels, whispered in every crack and cranny of the store.
The silence existed only between the two men at opposite ends of the room. It was a silence of cunning, of murderous thoughts, of anticipation. Lew drew a breath and eased up the pressure on his trigger finger. It was growing numb. He let his breath out slow and flexed his finger, just for a second. Or two. Then he eased his finger back onto the trigger, took up the slack, and waited some more.
Neither man spoke, and that terrible silence between them grew to monstrous proportions. To Lew, it was like being in a dark cave with an animal he could not see, a ferocious animal that was stalking him as silently as a wraith. His ears strained to hear even the faintest sound from that corner where Colfax had gone, a breath, the scrape of a boot, the creak of leather. Anything. The silence got hard as granite. It sat there like an immense boulder that neither man could see through, or move out of the way.
Moments passed. Agonizing moments that taxed the patience of both men, that strained their nerves taut, to the breaking point. The silence grew larger, harder, more impenetrable, despite the monotonous mutter of the rain on the roof, the clatter of water in the drain spouts, the swish of its broom across the floor where the wind blew in through gutted glass windows.
The wind abated for a moment.
That’s when Colfax opened up.
He fired two quick shots, fanning his six-gun with a rapid slap of his hand on the hammer. Two flames erupted from the corner, orange flashes that briefly illuminated the sheriff’s crouching form. Lew fired in between bursts, holding low, just beneath the first blossom of exploding powder. He heard the bullet strike something soft. Then he heard a grunt, followed by the sound of a body slamming into something wooden, perhaps the corner of the wall. There was a low groan coming from that same corner.
“Zane, you bastard,” Colfax growled, his voice laden with the gravel of pain.
Lew moved to his left, careful where he stepped. He eased the hammer back on his Colt, but did not fire.
Another low groan from the corner. Then, the metallic click of a cocking hammer.
But no shot.
Lew waited, his nerves singing like banjo strings plucked with an iron chisel.
More groaning. Soft, low. Muttered curses.
Did Colfax have something up his sleeve? Was he going to fire off another shot?
A man thinks strange thoughts at such times. Hunkered down as he was, Lew tried to picture where his bullet had gone, the damage it might have done. Was Colfax leaning against the wall, or had he gone down? Was he crumpled up into a ball, his life leaking away with every pump of his heart?
Lew did not know.
The wind slashed at the openings in the broken windows, hurling rain like silver lances into the store. The intensity of the rain increased, sounding like a billion rim shots on a snare drum. The wind howled, shrieking like some wounded ghost, keening against the sharp edges of the building, the ceiling inside.
“Zane?”
Lew didn’t answer. He shifted his grip on the pistol, held it high, near his shoulder, his arm extended almost full length. He marked the sound of Colfax’s voice, tried to picture his target in his mind.
But he did not shoot, either. He waited.
“Zane. I’m done for. You bastard.”
It could be a trick, Lew thought. Colfax might want to draw him out in the open and fire that bullet tucked away in the cylinder in the hammer’s direct path.
“Should have killed you a month ago,” Colfax said.
Colfax’s voice had grown weaker. The last words came with breathy emphasis, spread wide apart, spoken slow, with effort.
Was the sheriff bleeding to death? Was he playing possum?
Lew didn’t know. He just knew that he didn’t trust this man with a badge, a man as corrupt as Pope and Canby, a traitor to his profession as an officer of the law.
Lew extended himself and stretched out flat on the floor. He began to slide out into the empty aisle. The rain covered the sound of his clothes scraping on the wooden floor. He inched along until he was onto the wet part. This made it easier for him to wriggle in between objects that were stacked along the aisle: milk cans, coils of manila rope, nail kegs, paint cans.
“Zane?” Colfax called out again. His voice was even weaker than before.
And he was very close to where Zane had crawled.
“You ain’t gonna answer, are you?”
In his mind, Zane said, “No.”
He crawled closer until he could hear Colfax’s heavy breathing. He strained to pick out the blob that was Colfax from the heavy shadow in the corner. He thought he saw something, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Get me a doc, Zane. For God’s sake, show some mercy, will you?”
Zane thought about that. It was a reasonable request for a dying man.
“Slide your Colt toward the front door, Colfax,” Zane said, raising his head some distance off the floor.
A mistake.
Colfax fired his pistol, as Zane hugged the floor. The bullet steamed over Lew’s head. He saw the flash, the outline of Colfax. The sheriff was propped up in the corner, sitting, his clothing soaked with blood. Lew knew right where Colfax was.
Lew got to his feet in an instant. Crouching, he took aim on the place where Colfax sat. He squeezed the trigger and stood up. He ran to the corner and fired another round into Colfax, just to make sure. He looked down, saw the pistol in the sheriff’s slack hand. He kicked it away and bent down close, cocking his pistol. He put the barrel against Billy Jim’s forehead, wondering if he still had a live cartridge in the cylinder.
Colfax made a rattling sound in his throat. He wheezed a last breath and keeled over. Lew touched two fingers to the carotid artery in his neck, feeling for a telltale pulse.
Colfax was stone dead.
Lew squatted there next to Colfax, listening to the rain. Spray splashed against his face. The sound was suddenly soothing and he felt strangely calm for having just killed another man.
After a few moments, he heard Seneca call out to him.
“Lew? Lew? Are you still alive?”
He smiled in the darkness, took a deep breath.
He had never felt more alive in his life.
7
LEW STOOD UP.
“Yes, Seneca,” he yelled. “It’s all over. I’m coming back.”
He heard a scream of delight from the back room. He walked along the broken front of the store, the rain pelting him. He was impervious to it. It felt like a cleansing rain to him, a rain that was washing all the ugliness out of the world.
He walked up the aisle. A flash of lightning illuminated the entire showroom for an instant. He headed toward the light from the lamp on the office desk.
Seneca crawled out from under the desk when he entered the room. Her face was pale, her hair tousled, her clothes disheveled. Her cotton dress was wrinkled. She stood up and patted the unruly folds, pulled on the hem to straighten it.
“You’re all right.” She sighed.
“Yes.”
“Is—did you . . . ? I recognized that voice. It was Sheriff Billy Jim, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. He’s dead.”
She collapsed in his arms. He holstered his pistol and put his arms around her.
“They—they were all trying to kill you, Lew. Why are there such people in the world?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it over? Is it really over?”
“I don’t know that, either, Seneca.”
She pulled away from him and looked into his face for a long time, as if trying to read his thoughts, as if trying to see if anything had changed.
“You look the same,” she said. “But . . .”
“But what?”
“I—I don’t know. All this. The killing. The blood. The kidnapping.”
“Pope and Canby had no right to go after you to get me,” he said.
“I know. I keep asking myself why they did it. Why they dragged me into . . .”
“Into my ugly mess?”
“Well, yes. I guess so.”
“Is that all you care about? Getting your hands dirty over something I did?”
His jaw hardened and the lamplight flickered in his eyes and there were shadows there, too, and shadows of worry on his face that she hadn’t seen before.
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said, the whipcrack of a retort in her voice.
“How would you put it, Seneca?”
“You’re twisting my words, Lew.”
“Untwist them, then.”
She touched his arm, stroked the corded muscle under his wet shirt.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Will you take me home, Lew?”
“Meet me out back. I’ll fetch our horses.”
They walked to the back room, past the bodies of Pope and Canby. She tried to avoid looking at the bodies, but curiosity overcame her and she looked at each one just before Lew stepped outside into the rain and the darkness. She shuddered.
“See if you can find us a couple of slickers, Seneca,” he said, then went out the back door.
When he returned, riding Ruben and leading Seneca’s horse, she had on a raincoat and held another in her hand.
“Come on,” he yelled above the patter of rain. She came down the steps, handed him a raincoat, and went to her horse. She climbed into the wet saddle while Lew donned the slicker she had brought him. It was a little small so he didn’t button it. But it kept some of the rain off his back.