The Circuit Rider

by Dani Amore

  “My friend Gustave Courbet was once stabbed in the buttocks by a vicious prostitute. I learned how to bandage wounds from a drunken nurse who talked me through the procedure. That, and I studied medicine for six months, but I had a fainting problem no one at the school could cure.”

  “You learned well,” Bird said, studying the bandage. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure, mademoiselle. I only fainted twice during the procedure.”

  Suddenly, Bird was famished. She walked to her saddlebags and found they were empty.

  A large fifty-caliber Sharps rifle sat next to the man’s belongings.

  “I hate to impose more than we already have, seeing as you probably saved our lives, but do you have anything to eat, Mr. Three Names?” she said. “My friend over there is looking pretty shaky.”

  “Yes, I have fresh biscuits left over from this morning, with some honey. Please help yourself.”

  Bird saw a plate with the biscuits next to a pot on the fire. She brought two biscuits to Tower, then ate one herself.

  They were delicious.

  “I could get used to this,” Bird said. She glanced over at the painter.

  “I might have to marry you,” she said.

  Seventy-Nine

  “The risk of infection is quite high,” the man said.

  It was now evening, and the sun had gone down an hour earlier, leaving a cool breeze that was threatening to turn into a chilling wind.

  Bird sat next to the fire, which was now bigger than she would have liked. It would make finding them an easy job for Toby Raines and his men, if they were anywhere in the vicinity.

  Jonathan Morris Bunker — Bird had forced him to repeat his name several times so she would get it right — was looking over at Tower, who now lay wrapped in a blanket, his face pale and slick with sweat.

  “I believe you are accurate in that diagnosis,” she said.

  Bird glanced down at her coffee cup, again filled with the strange drink called absinthe.

  “How did you end up finding us, Mr. Bunker?” Bird said.

  “Please call me John,” he said. “I had walked down to the river to clean my brushes, and myself for that matter, and there the two of you were. At first I thought you were dead, but then you pulled out your pistol and pointed it at me.”

  Bird shook her head. She had no recollection of that.

  “I used the mule over there,” he said, pointing toward the meadow, where Bird had spotted the animal earlier in the day, “and managed to get the two of you up here.”

  “Well, I greatly appreciate your efforts, John,” Bird said. “We would probably both be dead if you hadn’t helped us.”

  “Think nothing of it,” he said. “I’ve been pulled many times from the gutters of Europe by friends as well as complete strangers. It was the least I could do.”

  Bird looked at him. He had a small round face, with big, soft brown eyes and a thin mustache. His hands were delicate, with long, pale fingers.

  He sighed. “Ah, Europe.”

  Bird refilled her glass.

  “What is this shit again?” she said.

  “Absinthe,” Bunker said. “Also known as the Green Fairy.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s made with wormwood and some other herbs, including fennel and anise. Poets and painters love it because it allows access into recesses of the creative brain, unlocking powers one never knew one had.”

  Bird watched Bunker look off into the distance. She raised an eyebrow at him. “You are a bit of a bag of hot air,” she said. “But I like your style.”

  She drank more of the absinthe. “Miss my whiskey, though.”

  “You like whiskey?” he said.

  “More than life itself.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  Bunker got up, went to his case, and pulled out a small, square bottle filled with a dark-brown liquid.

  She looked down at the drink in her hand. “Did you say this stuff makes me hallucinate?” she said.

  “It’s been known to create strange visions in some people,” Bunker said.

  “Well, I hope that’s not the case right now,” Bird said. “Is that really whiskey?”

  “Yes, a very high quality I brought over from Scotland.”

  Bird looked up at the stars.

  “Thank you, God.”

  Eighty

  Tower was cold. Which was strange, because it was summer in Saint Louis. He stood on the street corner, the comforting bulge of the gun in its holster on his hip.

  His teeth were chattering.

  He had to stay quiet. It was the end of the case, the one that had consumed most of his life for the past six months.

  It had all come down to this moment. It would all end tonight on this street corner, where the man who had been embezzling money from his client was due to arrive. The client who had hired the private detective agency would not be here.

  Only Mike Tower.

  It was a last-minute request for a meeting that had set Mike Tower on edge. Either the embezzler, a shifty banker named Ted McCarthy, had finally taken the bait or he had figured out that Tower had been working undercover all along.

  In which case, it wouldn’t be McCarthy who showed up, but probably a thug whose job it would be to make Mike Tower go away. Permanently.

  It had begun to rain, a warm summer sprinkle that put a shine on the street and made the distant sounds from the train yard seem a little farther away.

  The soft scrape of a shoe on cobblestone caught Tower’s ear, and he turned.

  He had his answer.

  McCarthy was nowhere to be found.

  Instead, he’d sent not one man, but two.

  One already had his gun out. The second was in the process of bringing something out from inside his vest.

  Tower drew instinctively, calmly. The first man fired a shot that chipped the cobblestone a foot in front of Tower. Tower’s shot puffed the man’s shirt directly over his heart, and he took another step forward on a leg that collapsed beneath him.

  The second man’s hand now held a knuckle-duster — a short-barreled gun with at least five bullets in it. But the man realized he had to get much closer to Tower, so he began to run straight at him.

  It was an easy thing to do, and Tower did it. He swung his pistol over and fired again, this time drilling a bullet into the center of the second man’s forehead.

  Before the man could fall, Tower heard a soft rustle of fabric behind him.

  Again, instinct took over, and he turned and fired.

  Now it was hot.

  Tower felt fire.

  The glow of a face.

  No, he thought.

  No!

  Eighty-One

  The fire popped in the middle of the night, and Bird opened her eyes. Over the years, she had trained herself to isolate and identify each sound in her environment before she fell asleep, no matter how many empty whiskey bottles were on the night table next to her.

  So she very well knew that the pop of the fire wasn’t what woke her.

  It was the mumbling.

  She sat up and looked over near the fire.

  Tower was sitting by the fire, the blanket around him, his face pouring with sweat. His hair was wet and matted down. He was staring at Bunker’s easel, upon which sat a painting. It didn’t look done; it appeared to be more of a sketch with some small amounts of color added.

  But it was the image that caught Bird’s attention.

  The painting was of a young woman.

  Bird almost didn’t recognize herself.

  But the painting was of a younger Bird Hitchcock.

  Tower was staring at it.

  “She’s coming for me,” he said.

  Bird got to her feet and went to Tower. Bunker stirred in his little makeshift cot, but Bird couldn’t tell if he was awake or not.

  Tower’s voice rose. “No! Don’t run toward me like that!”

  Now the volume had increased, and Bird saw B
unker twitch in his blankets, then grab a small pair of wire spectacles and put them on.

  “What in the dickens?” he said.

  “Relax,” Bird said to Tower. She tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but as soon as she touched him and felt how hot his skin was, he flinched.

  “No!” he shouted.

  Bird stepped back from Tower.

  Bunker got to his feet as well. “He’s delirious with fever.”

  “Yes, I figured that out,” Bird said.

  Suddenly, Tower jerked once. Twice. A third time.

  And then he went still. He looked at the painting of Bird. There was more moisture on his face, and Bird wondered if he was crying.

  Tower turned to look at her.

  “I killed her,” he said. “I shot her and she died.”

  He fell forward and landed on his face in the dirt.

  Eighty-Two

  “Holy Jesus!” Bird said as she tore the bandage from Tower’s side. She had managed to get Tower back onto his bedroll, but clearly the infection had spread.

  Now she looked down at the gunshot wound in Tower’s side. It had swollen shut and tightened into a straining cone of red skin tinged with yellow streaks. Long pink lines radiated out from the entry point.

  “My assessment? That is quite a bad infection,” Bunker said.

  “Looks like it’s about to explode,” Bird said.

  “It is, unfortunately. And if it explodes inward, and goes into his bloodstream, he could very well die. I read that in a textbook before I dropped out.”

  Bird nodded.

  “We have to lance it,” she said. Bird pulled out her knife, knelt by the fire, and held the blade over the flames.

  “Bring me that whiskey,” she said.

  Bunker brought her the bottle. “I’ve got one clean handkerchief left,” he said. “We’ll use that to seal the hole.”

  “Get him ready,” she said.

  Bunker went behind Tower and pressed him firmly back onto the bedroll. He tried to force the wooden handle of a paintbrush between his teeth. It wouldn’t work. Tower’s teeth were chattering.

  “I hope he doesn’t crack a tooth,” Bunker said.

  “Hold him steady,” Bird said. “What a waste of whiskey,” she said, taking a long drink. She splashed some onto the top of the infected wound, then aimed the red-hot end of the knife at the center of the bulging infection.

  She let out a long breath and then drove the knife in.

  Tower lunged up as a stream of blood mixed with yellow pus sprayed out from the wound.

  Bunker fainted and fell backward.

  Bird immediately withdrew the knife and poured whiskey directly into the gaping hole.

  Tower screamed and tried to get up, but Bird put a hand on his chest and pushed him back, and he collapsed onto his bedroll.

  Bird plugged the wound with the clean handkerchief, then tied a long strip of shirt around Tower’s waist, holding the new, clean bandage in place.

  “Christ, I hope that works and doesn’t kill him,” Bird said. She held up the whiskey bottle. There was still quite a bit left.

  Bunker sat up, looking confused.

  Bird showed him the whiskey bottle. “I’m like a good doctor — use just enough to get the job done while being careful not to overmedicate.”

  She took a long drink of the whiskey. It was probably the best she had ever had.

  Bunker went back to his blankets and lay down.

  Bird glanced up at the painting.

  “What in the hell are you doing with that?” she said.

  “The subject chooses the artist, not the other way around,” he said, his voice especially soft. He was a fragile man, Mr. Jonathan Morris Bunker.

  Bird guzzled from the whiskey bottle.

  Hell, she needed to recover, too.

  She had just stabbed a man, after all.

  Eighty-Three

  A full day later, dawn broke, and it took Tower’s fever with it. Bird sat with a cup of coffee in her hand, fortified with the last of the whiskey. She already knew she would have to go back to the absinthe before the day’s end. She wasn’t happy about it, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Bird studied Tower’s face. Maybe it was the shocking lack of color in his skin, or the way his face seemed even tighter, but he looked like a different man. Or maybe it was just that he’d lost weight from fighting off the infection and it made him seem especially different, vulnerable even.

  Oh, who was she trying to fool? She knew why he looked different to her. He had finally unburdened his secret, even if he had done so unwittingly. Now she knew why, most likely, Tower had found religion. He’d killed an innocent girl, unless the fever had indeed caused him to imagine such a thing.

  But somehow Bird had a very strong feeling that what he had described in his feverish state was very close to what had actually happened.

  Bird stood, walked past the tepid fire that was just barely still smoldering, and followed a dim path through long grass to a clearing, where Jonathan Morris Bunker stood before one of his canvases, working with an intensity that surprised Bird.

  She stood off to the side, watched the way he held the slim wooden palette with his left hand, the tiny dabs of color arrayed on its surface, and the way he mixed them together, working quickly and effortlessly.

  “You can come closer if you’d like,” he said without turning around.

  Bird walked up next to him.

  “It’s pretty,” she said, meaning it. He had splashed across canvas an image of the large meadow with the light-grayish mountains in the background.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “And just like you told me,” Bird said. “It isn’t supposed to look exactly like what you’re seeing. It’s just supposed to give you the overall impression.”

  Bunker bobbed his head vigorously. “Exactly! Precisely that!”

  Bird watched the way he blended colors, shading the foreground, forcing the eye to go this way or that.

  “What made you decide you wanted to be a painter?” she asked.

  Bunker didn’t turn to look at her as he answered.

  “I didn’t make the decision. It was made for me. Probably like you and your guns, right? You never consciously decided you wanted to be a gunfighter, am I correct?”

  “Nope, never had a choice,” she said.

  “It was the same with me and making pictures,” Bunker said. “It was a calling.”

  He lifted the painting off the easel and slid it into a case that was lined with wooden slats; each set of slats created a separate compartment. Within the case, Bird saw at least six more frames stretched with canvas. Bunker selected the next one in order and put it on the easel.

  “The light changes by the hour,” he explained. “This meadow will look completely different every hour by the hour. So I’ve got a painting for each corresponding light pattern. Displayed together, the paintings will create an effect that will make the viewer feel as if they are watching the light change before their eyes.”

  Bunker turned back to the painting, and Bird looked at it. It did seem totally different from the other—

  The canvas was suddenly splashed with bright red and Bird saw tufts of hair on the back of Bunker’s head float away, and then she was diving to the ground as the report of the rifle filled the air.

  Eighty-Four

  When Bird had been hunting meat for her adopted family’s children, she always had a rule: never let emotions get in the way of her steadiness on the trigger. Not even when she pictured the young children back at the squalid little cabin depending on her to bring in food, she never let feelings get in the way of her ability to make an accurate shot.

  So when she ran back to the camp after leaving Bunker dead, half of his head blown off and splattered onto the canvas, she felt no emotion.

  What she did feel was a dead thing, a cold slab of certainty that she would set things right.

  Bird rounded the trail into camp, h
eard the sound of approaching horses, and drew both guns.

  Tower was no longer near the fire. She spotted him off near a stand of scrub brush, a trail in the dirt from where he had crawled detailing his path.

  He was on his side, not moving.

  Bird saw three men emerge from the trees less than twenty yards from the clearing. One of them she recognized from the ambush back at the waterfall.

  They looked lean and haggard, desperate even. Just the kind of violent, worthless men Toby Raines loved to surround himself with.

  The men did not hesitate. They charged directly at Bird, and she fired both guns, working the hammer and trigger unconsciously.

  Two of the men were knocked off their horses.

  The third raised his rifle at Bird, but she fired both guns again. One bullet ripped out his throat, and he veered violently on the horse as the second shot hit him in the belly. The man’s horse pivoted wildly, and its passenger went the other way, landing in a heap on the ground.

  Two more men thundered up a low incline from the south end of the clearing. Bird holstered her left gun and fanned four straight shots, knowing that her gun was empty with the last shot. One bullet hit the first man in his teeth, and she saw his jaw explode as he crumpled.

  The last man tried to turn his horse once he saw his comrades splayed out on the ground. Bird drew her left gun and fired from the hip, shooting him through the back. He fell off his horse. He tried to get up, but Bird raised her pistol, took careful aim, and put another bullet into his head.

  Silence returned to the area, only interrupted by the sound of horses running in the opposite direction of the gunfire.

  Bird went to Tower and found him on his back, staring up at the sky.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For not...helping you,” he said.

  Bird looked around at all of the dead men. Saw a vulture circling high overhead.

  “Help?” she said. “It’s one thing I’ve never really ever needed.”