by Robert Davis
She reached it just as the town began its nightly chorus. The wood beneath her feet groaned and the walls shuddered noisily. Madison started and ran outside, jumping off the boardwalk onto firm ground. All around her in every direction, every building was making the same noise, wood popping and cracking as if the whole town was about to fall down. She had heard it many times already but still it made her nervous and she headed out into the middle of the crossroads, where she thought she would be safe if anything did collapse.
From where she stood, the sound was even more creepy. She listened as it settled into rhythm, each individual building gradually falling into time with its neighbours until the sound rolled in towards her like a wave advancing up the shore, then turned and rolled back out again towards the desert.
In and out.
In and out.
The timing was as consistent as the ticking of a metronome and it moved through all four quarters of the town at the same pace. It was far too regular to be natural. Madison did not understand what caused it, but then there was a lot about Covenant she did not understand and more besides that she wished she had never found out about in the first place. Kip was dead and she wished that she had never insisted that he come here. Again fighting the urge to cry, she hurried down the street until she reached the house that she and Kip had claimed as their own.
The house had once belonged to a family with a little girl. Madison had found an old rag doll on the day they arrived and, though it was a little dusty, she had adopted it for her own. It was perched close to the bedroll that she and Kip had shared and she gathered it into her arms as she sat and swigged straight from the bottle of whisky.
Finally, she could hold off her sadness no longer and she broke down and cried.
When the messenger had brought Kip his invitation to compete, Kip had initially not wanted to attend. ‘It’ll just be a bunch of psychos, Maddy. No fun at all.’ Madison had known that really he was afraid that he would die, but that hadn’t bothered her at the time. She had only known Kip a few weeks and while he was fun to be with he was not as good a gunfighter as he liked to think he was, and Madison liked gunfighters. Proper ones.
She had figured that if Kip took her to Covenant then she would be able to replace him with somebody better, maybe even one of the Fastest Guns. He was only supposed to have been a temporary thing, a stepping stone. She had never expected to fall in love with him.
She slugged miserably from the bottle and wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve. She had never felt so wretched before in all her life and now she did not know what else to do with herself.
As she drank, she failed to notice the figure who stepped silently out of the darkness on the opposite side of the room. He was tall and wore a long, leather coat and a hat whose brim was pulled down low to cover his face in shadow. Pale, grey smoke rose from his body, smelling strongly of fulminate.
Madison did not notice. She had her back to him and was too wrapped up in her grief to hear him as he drew a long-barrelled revolver and thumbed back the hammer.
‘Wait.’
A second figure emerged from the shadows next to the first and closed a slender hand around his wrist, forcing him to lower his aim.
The first turned to the newcomer, questioningly.
‘We have made an accord.’ The second whispered, his voice like distant gunfire. ‘No one is to die. Yet,’ he added.
Unobserved, both figures melted back into the darkness.
Chapter 11
They were the six most powerful men in Wainsford: a banker, traders, a rancher and two lawyers; the men who ruled the town, who influenced, shaped it, milked and bled it dry. They were the six members of the town council and Shane had not been entirely surprised when they had asked to speak with him. He only wondered that it had taken them so long.
‘It would only be a temporary arrangement, you understand?’
Shane said nothing. The six men were all used to getting what they wanted and it showed. All wore power suits, gold watches and polished shoes. All, that was, except for the lawyer, Boyd, who did not care what other people thought of him and wore an ill-fitting suit, stained and mildewed, his hair unstyled, greasy and unkempt. He smelled of stale sweat and tobacco and cheap gin.
The six men were confident, domineering, and Shane took great pleasure in unnerving them with his dead-eyed stare until the point that even Reynolds, the fat rancher, shifted uncomfortably on the edge of his chair.
It was Boyd who was doing most of the talking. ‘You’ll be paid five-hundred dollars,’ he said. ‘How you do it is up to you but we want Fletcher out before the end of the week. This situation has gone on quite long enough.’
Earlier that morning, as Shane and Buchanan had talked on the boardwalk, the town council had gone to the jailhouse and formally terminated Fletcher’s employment as town marshal. ‘You’ve been neglecting your duties,’ Boyd had told him, speaking to the locked jailhouse door. ‘This town is overrun and instead of protecting us you’re holed up like a coward. This is unacceptable.’
Since only the town marshal was supposed to use the jailhouse, they had demanded that Fletcher and his men vacate it immediately, to which Fletcher had replied in no uncertain terms. After a lengthy argument he had eventually flung his marshal’s badge out the window and it now rested in the palm of Shane’s hand, where Boyd had put it.
Shane did not know if the councilmen were just trying to preserve their interests in the town or if somebody more powerful had wired them before the telegraph lines had been cut, but they had not hired him to get rid of the bounty hunters in town; they had asked him to get rid of Fletcher, Ben and Alan Grant, and in so doing had effectively given him a free hand to do what he liked with Hunte.
Hunte’s name had not been mentioned once in all of the discussion and it was clear that the councilmen wanted no complicity in whatever became of him. If there were any repercussions for what happened in town then Shane had no doubt that they would hang him out to dry. He expected no less, but that didn’t mean he had to play by their rules. ‘I want to be sworn in,’ he said. ‘In front of witnesses. The hotel manager and his wife will do. And I want my contract in writing.’
The banker, Patterson, was not keen. ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ he said evasively.
‘Hunte’s wanted in front of a Congressional Committee. If he dies because of this, I’m not having my head put on the block.’
Boyd was slick. ‘We’ll swear you in,’ he agreed. ‘And have everything done up in writing. Effective immediately, you will be marshal.’
‘And I want a deputy.’ Shane said.
Boyd’s face twitched in irritation. ‘I’m not sure we can find–’
‘I already have someone in mind.’
‘Fine.’ Patterson said. ‘Employ him. But you’ll have to pay him out of your own pocket.’
‘Yes. About the money,’ Shane said, turning to face him with his dead-eyed stare. ‘It’s not enough.’
In truth, the money was fine; Shane just enjoyed fucking with them.
The tray scraped as it was pushed into his cell, bringing with it the smell of greasy fried bacon and lukewarm coffee. It was not Buchanan who delivered it but one of the invigilators instead, a solemn-looking man in his early-thirties who left without saying a word.
Shane rose from his bunk and rubbed his head with his palms. He felt different this morning. Perhaps it was just that he had slept well for the first time in six years, but he felt clear-headed and composed. What was more, he had an appetite and wolfed down his breakfast, mopping up the last drips of fat with a crust of bread. He paced over to the window when he was finished and looked out, angling himself so that he could see to the end of the alley and look onto West Street and the crooked walls of the Grande hotel. The sun beat down on another hot and dry morning with scarcely a cloud in the sky to offer any shade. A pair of invigilators walked by.
It was all exactly as it had been the day before, only this time Sha
ne saw it with different eyes. It was as if he had been seeing in black and white and now the colours were back again. Details that he had only half-noticed the day before now caught his eye: the way one of the two invigilators favoured his right leg over his left; the tilt of the third step that led up to the Grande’s porch, which was more precarious than the rest. Little details that were insignificant on their own but which added up to make a larger picture.
A picture that became a map or a diagram that went some way towards forming a plan of escape.
Shane stepped back into the shade. He had been thinking a lot about the newspaper that Buchanan had brought him yesterday, about how the world outside of Covenant thought he was dead. Before yesterday, Shane had been convinced that he had nothing worth living for. Now he knew better. Outside of Covenant he was a free man, free to stop running and free to start over again. If anybody ever said that he looked like Shane Ennis he could laugh and remind them that Shane Ennis was dead, he just had the misfortune to be a man who looked like him. His name . . . his name could be whatever he wanted it to be.
Shane Ennis was dead.
All he had to do was escape from Covenant.
He turned as the door to the sheriff’s office creaked open and Castor Buchanan strode in. ‘Well, something’s got you looking sparky!’
Shane did not answer him but waited sullenly while he unlocked the door to his cell.
‘Come on, out you come. Round two, Shane. Time to show us what you’re really capable of.’
As Shane stepped out of his cell he deliberately dropped his shoulder into Buchanan’s chest, driving the wind from his lungs. Buchanan was pushed sideways. A second later, his temper exploded and he hit Shane like a cannonball. His arm came up across Shane’s throat and drove him hard against the bars of his cell, pinning him there and choking him. Buchanan pressed his face close, eye-to-eye, the light of his madness glittering like sparks from a tinder box.
‘I let you get that shot in yesterday,’ he snarled. ‘But don’t think you’re so fucking important to what we’re doing here that I won’t lay you out if you fuck with me again.’
He pulled his arm away and Shane dropped to his knees, gagging for breath.
‘There’s plenty of ways I can hurt you and still leave you well enough to compete.’ Buchanan said. ‘Just remember that.’ He hauled Shane up and propelled him towards the door. Shane staggered where he was flung, colliding bodily against the wall. He was shaken and his throat felt raw, but inwardly he felt victorious. He had wanted to test Buchanan’s reaction and what he had learned was very encouraging. Buchanan’s temper was still volatile for all that he had learned to control himself, and it was still the easiest means by which he could be manipulated.
Shane would remember that for when the time was right.
The streets were already lined with contestants and invigilators, all of whom had gathered for the morning’s first match: the fight between Matt Nesbitt and Chastity.
Shane walked to the edge of the boardwalk and sat down on his own. Buchanan settled on the wooden bench behind him while Shane’s jailer stood nearby, watching Shane with narrowed eyes. Buchanan’s temper was still unsettled and Shane could feel his anger radiating from him, the emotion evident in the way he breathed loudly and shifted restlessly on the bench. Shane noted that it took him a while to calm himself completely.
A sullen breeze that did nothing to ease the morning heat blew dust across the road. Shane let his attention wander slowly, first to the invigilators – whose body language he discreetly studied, ascertaining who was good and who merely wanted to be – and then the contestants.
To his surprise, Kip Kutcher’s girlfriend was still around. Shane had not expected to see her again, figuring that the town would have disposed of her during the night, and yet still she was here, looking in fine health but for what looked like a bad night’s sleep and a hangover. She had tricked her eyes out with liner and powdered her face but she had not been able to hide all of the signs that she had spent most of the night crying.
The fact that Kip’s death had upset her so badly, or rather, the fact that she had tried to conceal it surprised Shane almost as much as the fact that she was still alive. It implied a level of self-respect and pride that women of her kind seldom possessed in any great quantity, and he wondered if maybe there was more to her than he had first assumed. He made a mental note for future consideration and turned his attention to Matt Nesbitt, who was pacing back and forth by the side of the road.
He wore his nerves like an overcoat: plain for all to see. Like the girl, he showed signs of having passed a sleepless night but that was to be expected. Having seen Chastity fight, there was not a man in Covenant who would have put money on Matt Nesbitt surviving this round and it was a measure of his courage that he had come to the crossroads at all.
He periodically stopped his pacing to check the time on his pocket watch, or draw his Merwin revolver and check it over before returning it to the holster; acts of nervous repetition that nonetheless passed the time for him until the door of the Grande was opened and Nathaniel emerged with his bodyguards, Whisperer, Chastity and her nanny.
Pointlessly, Nesbitt checked his watch for the final time, snapped it shut, and went out to take his mark. He walked with his head held deliberately high as if he could fool anyone that he was not afraid. The only prayer he had was that he would meet his fate with dignity and not die like a coward.
Nathaniel took Chastity from her nanny and led her to the crossroads. As with the day before, the girl’s face was expressionless, like something sculpted in fine bone china with wide blue eyes painted on above a straight, flat mouth. Her steps were clumsy, feet scuffing in the dirt, so that Nathaniel almost seemed to be dragging her half the time. The hand that he held might have belonged to someone else for all the awareness she had of it.
The mood along the street became apprehensive. Everybody watched as Nathaniel positioned her opposite Matt Nesbitt and drew out the tiny pocket revolver. The girl stared vacantly straight through it and into the middle distance beyond.
Nathaniel tucked the weapon into her holster, then straightened her shoulders so that she was facing Nesbitt more squarely. He then hurried to the side of the road.
Nesbitt stared at her, his brow furrowed with concentration. Everybody knew what was going to happen next.
The girl seemed unaffected for the space of three heartbeats and then her posture straightened. She drew herself up from her slouching stance and raised her head, eyes swimming into stark focus, piercing Nesbitt with her gaze.
Nathaniel called it, seeing that she was ready, and both fighters reached for their guns.
Two shots rang out in rapid succession.
The first struck Nesbitt in the hip, shattering his pelvis into splinters of bone that lacerated his kidney and spleen. The second shot hit him in the chest going faster than the speed of sound. It ripped straight through his lung and burst the left ventricle of his heart, filling his chest cavity with blood. He staggered sideways, clutching at his side, blood frothing on his lips. His gun slipped from numb fingers and hit the dirt. Seconds later he sank down on his knees next to it and cursed Chastity with his final breath.
The third shot caught everybody by surprise.
It was unexpected and broke the post-match silence like a hammer breaking glass. It was followed moments later by a dull thump as one of the invigilators fell from his perch on the clock tower and hit the ground, dead.
Startled, everyone looked to see who had fired.
The culprit was in plain sight for all to see. Chastity stood with her tiny revolver pointed at the spot where the dead invigilator had stood, thin wisps of grey-white smoke curling from the barrel.
The surviving invigilators reacted at once, bringing their guns to bear on her. Nathaniel shouted at them. ‘No! Stop!’
A fourth shot rang out.
It was not the piercing crack of a rifle but the angry cough of Chastity’s revolver and a se
cond invigilator fell in a burst of crimson. The girl had moved with phenomenal speed, going instantly for the man who had moved the fastest.
Shane and the other contestants instantly went for cover. Chastity moved, turning on the spot with balletic grace, scanning the multitude of moving targets for the one who next represented the greatest threat to her and settling on a third invigilator. The man had her in his sights but held his fire on Nathaniel’s order. For some reason, Chastity held her fire as well and a tense stand-off was achieved. The little girl stood in the middle of the crossroads, surrounded by five invigilators. Others came running and Nathaniel shouted at them to stand down. ‘She is not to be harmed,’ he ordered.
The invigilators obeyed him insofar as they did not shoot, but they kept their rifles trained on her diminutive figure. Peering out from behind the water trough where he had dived for cover, Shane studied her technique. She was completely at ease with the situation. She kept turning in a slow circle, gun moving in a controlled sweep, her eyes making small, rapid movements to keep everybody in sight. She reacted quickly to the slightest possible threat.
It was an incredible and chilling thing to see. Watching her, Shane figured that she was at least as good as he had been in his prime, if not better. He saw the look of coldness in her eyes and knew that she would not back down. She would fight until the invigilators killed her, and she would claim one of them with every shot she fired.
Across the street, Nathaniel was aware that he had lost control of the situation, and he was worried. His invigilators were hired men, loyal to the money he paid them and the promises he had made but at the end of the day their loyalty was bought, not offered, and that meant that there were limits beyond which they would not be pushed. Sooner or later, he knew one of them would disobey his orders and Chastity would die, and that was unacceptable. She was too important to what he was doing in Covenant. True, he would still have Ennis if she died, but he placed less value on that old gunslinger. Chastity was fresh. Chastity was pure.