Powder Keg

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by Ed Gorman


  “Go on and kill me, you crazy fucker. Just get it over with.”

  He was about to oblige me when the left side of his head blew up, firing a heft of bloody hair up against the blue sky. He lived just long enough to look surprised. And then he fell face forward, his gun firing off a last round into the snow.

  And then there was just the wind and my throbbing shoulder.

  And after a time, the sobbing.

  It took me a long time to get up. And I fell down twice before I reached her.

  Seeing my wound and my condition seemed to slap Wendy back to reality. She still had the carbine she’d used to kill him. She sat on the stoop. She seemed unaware of how bloody her dress was. He’d gotten her in the chest.

  She looked so pretty and aggrieved and insane sitting there in her blood-soaked gingham, that sweet little face that would never know a smile again. And maybe that wouldn’t matter to her anyway because someday she would have to admit to herself that her child was dead.

  Or so I thought.

  I took two lumbering steps toward her just as she leaned over backward, sprawling over the stoop. Dead.

  Chapter 41

  I stayed a few days longer than I’d planned. Jen and Clarice were there every day. Clarice would soon become her adopted daughter.

  Jen also decided that the two-bed hospital was no place for a federal man to recover his strength. I figured she had her hands full with Clarice, but she took me to her place, the scandal of it be damned, and for four days running we played nurse and patient. She was a most generous nurse, giving all of her body and at least some of her soul to making me feel better.

  I never wanted to get better but dammit I did. On a frosty Sunday morning, she kissed me goodbye on the depot platform. She went back to live down the scandal and I went on to Washington to find out who I was supposed to kill next.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Linda and Kate Siebels, for their invaluable help with this book

  About the Author

  ED GORMAN’S western fiction has won the Spur Award and his crime fiction has won the Shamus and Anthony Awards and has been shortlisted for the Edgar® Award. In addition, his writing has appeared in Redbook, the New York Times, Ellery Queen Magazine, Poetry Today, and other publications.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Books by Ed Gorman

  CAVALRY MAN: POWDER KEG

  CAVALRY MAN: THE KILLING MACHINE

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  CAVALRY MAN POWDER KEG. Copyright © 2006 by Ed Gorman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition January 2007 ISBN 9780061740343

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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