by Adam Bender
For the life of him, he couldn’t make sense of what she had told him. She’d come to see the fireworks with her pa. Three men wearing the colors of the Red Stripe Gang showed up on motorcycles, demanding that her daddy come with them. When he refused, the gangsters tied his hands together and forced him onto the back of one of the bikes. They drove him out into the desert up a big hill that had come to be known locally as Hangman’s Last View.
The Wanderer had an idea of what might be waiting on the other side of the hill. What he couldn’t figure out was why the Red Stripe Gang would care about this one man. They didn’t kill people randomly, let alone string ’em up. He reckoned that girl’s daddy must have riled up the Gang something fierce.
He spied a low bush of cactus just in time to pull left around it. But the move set the bike heading straight for a large red rock inclined forty-five degrees up over the peak of the hill. With no time to go around it, the Wanderer pulled up on the handlebars and lifted the front tire onto the boulder. Together, man and bike leaped into the air. For a split second, he took in the evening stars. Then, as he pushed the bike down to complete the airborne arc, he saw the hanging tree and four men.
The bike landed with a thud, unleashing a sandstorm on the other side of the hill. The cloud of dust blinded the Wanderer but he was able to follow the gangsters’ yells. When the exclamations grew loud and close, he swerved sideways and slammed on the brakes, setting off another wave of dust.
The Wanderer waited for the air to clear with his hands ready at his hip holsters. A flabby man with a bandana tied tightly over his mouth appeared through the cloud of dirt. The Gang members had tied the man’s wrists and ankles and slung a noose over his head. The rest of the rope was swung over a thick branch jutting out sideways from a knotted tree, about ten feet up the trunk. The burly gangster from the bar in the Harley-Davidson jacket held the victim protectively like a shield, while the other two gangsters — the pipe-limbed crook and the man with the X tattoos — held the rope firmly on the other side. A strong pull could lynch the man in seconds.
The hogtied victim strangled out a wide-eyed exclamation.
“Let him go!” directed the Wanderer.
“Who the fuck are you?” yelled Pipes, letting go of the rope and waving his Breck 17 erratically.
Harley’s eyes glinted with recognition. “You’re the sissy from the saloon.” A deep laugh erupted from his belly as he turned to enlighten his colleagues. “This is that wimp I was tellin’ y’all about! The one who was watchin’ some damn rom-com movie at the saloon!”
Pipes and Mr. X cackled gleefully, but stopped abruptly when the Wanderer laughed back. “Oh, there weren’t no movie. I was just watchin’ the three of you flirtin’ with one another.” That stopped their laughter, but the Wanderer kept going. He nodded at the knotted oak. “I reckon y’all found yourselves a mighty fine kissin’ tree.”
At that instant, there was a pop and an explosion in the sky. With a wide grin, the Wanderer stuck his thumb back at the spray of falling red light from the evening’s first firecracker. “Now ain’t that romantic?”
Pipes pointed his gun at the Wanderer’s chest and looked to Harley for directions. Several more explosions lit up the sky. Faintly, in the background, the Wanderer could hear the brass band playing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Harley yelled over the commotion, “I think you best be getting back to town for the celebrations! This right here don’t concern you!”
The Wanderer shook his head. “I’m afraid it does. I won’t let you turn that little girl back there into an orphan.”
Pipes gave his boss another look, raising his eyebrows in question. As Harley nodded, the Wanderer lifted his Lassiter revolver. When Pipes turned, the Wanderer fired.
The sky turned blue as the skinny gangster’s plain white T-shirt turned beet red. Mr. X dropped the rope, letting it whip loose over the tree. Before the Red Striper could reach his gun, the Wanderer turned and fired a bullet through the ink cross on his throat. A quartet of trombones sang out in patriotic approval as Mr. X fell choking into the dirt.
Harley charged, carrying the bug-eyed victim in his arms like a battering ram. The Wanderer lined up a shot but, fearing that he might miss and hit the civilian, held his fire too long. The bound-and-gagged man flew from Harley’s grip, and the Wanderer could do nothing to dodge. Taking the full impact of the victim’s head in the ribs, he fell backward and dropped the Lassiter. The human missile fell heavily on top, pinning the gunman to the ground.
The Wanderer didn’t need his smart lens to tell him that the girl’s daddy was unconscious, a dead weight that couldn’t easily be budged. But he had moved heavier loads before. Straining with all his might, the gunslinger pushed … and pushed … until finally, he managed to roll the other man off.
Harley lumbered forward. Sitting up, the Wanderer saw a chance to shoot the gangster with his Breck 17, but couldn’t decide if he was ready to use the bad gun. Once more, hesitation got the best of him. The Red Striper tackled him like a football player, using his entire bulk to press him against the rocky sand.
“Hold still!” screamed Harley. He was trying to reach for a knife in his coat. The Wanderer twisted and bucked for all he was worth but the gangster was too strong and heavy.
As a blue firecracker reflected in the knife’s mirror blade, he remembered kissing Helen on top of a picnic blanket on this day two years ago. She had looked so beautiful.
The dagger continued to hover inches away from his chest, but Harley was gaping at something in the distance. The distraction was behind the Wanderer and he couldn’t see what it was, but he could hear the hum and scrape of an approaching motorcycle. Another firecracker went off. The gangster’s mouth opened in a silent scream, like fresh bait on a fishing hook. Blood spluttered from Harley’s forehead, and he collapsed in a sprawl on top of the Wanderer. Another dead weight, but this one was really dead.
Footsteps scuffed fast toward him. Someone grabbed dead Harley by the shoulders, pulling hard. The Wanderer pushed, and together they rolled the burly gangster onto his back.
*
Charlie watched the Wanderer tear a piece of cloth from the Red Striper’s shirt and use the rag to wipe the blood off his own face. The gunman looked as though he could use a hot shower.
The bounty hunter tried on a puckish smile. Truth was, he didn’t know how he was supposed to act in the circumstance. What do you say to a man after you save his life when what you’d meant to do was kill him? Charlie didn’t like riddles.
The Wanderer picked up his Stetson from the ground, dusted it off, and replaced it carefully atop his wild brown hair. Charlie extended a hand, meaning for the Wanderer to shake it, but the gunman just said, “Nice to finally meet you, bounty hunter.”
The statement knocked the wind out of Charlie better than any punch. So, the Wanderer had known! For how long?
“I appreciate the help, but get this straight — I don’t like bounty hunters.”
Charlie nodded slowly. “Because I was going to kill you or in gen —?”
“In general.”
“Yeah, okay, man. Word. But, hey, for what it’s worth, I ain’t gonna kill you no more.” He made a crossing motion with his hands to emphasize the point. “I mean, you seem all right, you know what I’m saying? And bounty hunting? Well, I think I’m just about done with that shit. Doesn’t suit a man of my sophistication, you know? Besides, the way I see it, any man who’s an enemy of the Red Stripers is a friend of mine!”
The Wanderer considered the three gangsters, following their lifeless stares up to the red-spattered sky. “Pretty night for fireworks.”
Charlie laughed. “I like you, man! You got that dry sense of humor. Hey, tell you what: let me help you bring the guy in the rope suit back into town before his daughter runs off and gets into trouble. Least I can do, right?” Detecting an unsure look in the Wanderer’s eyes, he pressed on. “Oh, and I know you like that sludgy dark beer. Well, when we finish t
his up, how about I buy you one? The name’s Charlie, by the way.”
“Heh.” The Wanderer’s eyes relaxed, and he gestured to the unconscious man. “Let’s get him up, then.”
*
The Wanderer reunited father and daughter and escorted the two of them back to their house in the Freetown suburbs. He let the bounty hunter tag along.
It was a messy home, but it was cozy, and the Wanderer could tell it was full of love. They sat around a wooden dining table, resting their drinks on magazines and torn envelopes. Three of the glasses contained whiskey; the fourth was filled to the brim with chocolate milk. The kid’s drink belonged to a mousy little girl named Kitty. She was dressed for sleep but full of vigor, and a pair of thick red glasses magnified her rapt attention.
“You’ve been looking at me funny all night,” said the Wanderer. “What do you want to know?”
“Are you the Wanderer?”
Charlie laughed. “He certainly is.”
The Wanderer suggested, “Maybe you should go up to bed.”
“She can stay,” said her father, Tony Potobo, as he rubbed the red marks on his neck left by the rope noose.
Kitty beamed. “I’ve read about you, Wanderer, how you helped that girl in Liberty.”
“You read about me?”
“There was a blog,” explained Charlie. He meant the statement to be helpful but Kitty turned on him immediately.
“Who are you anyway?” she demanded.
The bounty hunter looked at the Wanderer for help.
“It don’t matter who he is. He’s just some punk kid who reckons he’s a bounty hunter.”
Kitty looked mad. “That’s not a name.”
Charlie laughed and told her his real name, but the girl still looked unsatisfied. “No, you need a cool name, like the Wanderer has.”
As Charlie started to protest, the Wanderer burst out with a deep, booming laugh.
“Punk … no,” she continued undeterred. “Kid … Hunter. Kid Hunter! That’s a good name!”
“You know what?” mused Charlie. “That’s actually pretty sick!” He lowered his voice and spoke like the narrator of a movie trailer. “Who’s that cool stranger? It’s Kid Hunter, and if looks could kill, you’d be dead already.” He sat there grinning until the others’ stares became too oppressive. “What?”
“That’s not very good,” said Kitty.
Tony guffawed and squeezed his little girl. “The Wanderer and Kid Hunter — gee, Kitty, you make these guys sound like a couple of Western heroes!”
“They are heroes! They rescued you!”
The Wanderer half smiled. “I don’t know about that. I reckon Mr. Kills-With-Looks here didn’t come to Freetown to save the day.”
He had figured the kid for a bounty hunter from the day he stepped into the saloon. Charlie had been watching him for nearly a week. The Wanderer did some asking around and discovered that, yessiree, someone had put a bounty on his head. The job was posted not long after the shooting in Liberty, and this kid apparently was the one who’d taken it on. Well, he sure had a funny way of going about a kill.
“I never miss a chance to take down the Red Stripe Gang,” Charlie answered. “Anyway, why did you come to Freetown, Wanderer?”
“Reckon I’m just here for the fireworks.” He gulped the rest of his whiskey and pointed at the girl’s father. “Look, I suppose that’s about enough pleasantries. I want to know why the Red Stripe Gang was after you tonight.”
Tony turned his glass on the table a few times before answering. “They … they’ve threatened me before. Told me to stop making them.”
“Making what?”
Kitty chimed in. “Daddy’s a gun maker!”
Tony smiled modestly. “Not really. I just design them. People have to print them out themselves.”
Charlie scrunched his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘print them out’?”
The Wanderer grinned. “He’s talking about 3-D printing. DIY gunmakin’. May I see?”
Tony excused himself to the garage. When he returned he was holding a plastic gun that was a ringer for a Breck 17. The Wanderer weighed it in his hands and whistled. “It fires well?”
“Just as you’d expect. I’m starting to work on a few enhancements that should make it better even than the stuff at Breck Ammunition.”
It all made sense now. Printing your own gun wasn’t illegal, technically, but the Wanderer knew for a fact the gun monopoly wouldn’t like anything that might cut into its profits.
“So the Red Stripe Gang didn’t want you selling your own guns?” asked Kid Hunter. “But why would they care about that? Did they want a cut of the action?
Tony said no. “They only ever told me to stop what I was doing. Delete the design, burn all records of it …”
The Wanderer waved the men to silence. “It’s not the Red Stripe Gang who wants to destroy your design,” he said, leaning back thoughtfully in his chair. “It’s Gerard Breck.”
CHAPTER NINE
Sensationalist Speculation!
Rosa had pulled an all-nighter writing the article about the Breck 100X for Our Times. It wasn’t that she was slow, or that it was a complicated story. Something just kept stopping her from feeling satisfied. First, she tried writing it the way she knew her editor would want it. That was a piece of crap, so she tried writing it the way she wanted to write it. That felt good, but she knew Rebecca would hate it, so she started over again. On about the eighth version — and her fourth cup of coffee — Rosa sent in the article and called it a night.
Only it was already morning. So, she made a fifth cup of coffee and, with bleary eyes, opened The New West to check her traffic.
She sighed. A few hundred visitors in the past week. Not bad, but not great. The bland stories she wrote for Our Times usually got that many hits within an hour of publication.
Her phone rang. Rosa grimaced at the name on the caller ID.
“It’s Rebecca,” her editor confirmed when Rosa answered. “I don’t understand your story.”
The reporter felt her grip tighten around the cell phone. She took a deep breath and replied as cheerfully as she could manage. “Hi, Rebecca. I’ll pull up the article on my computer. Which part do you need me to clarify?”
The managing editor of Our Times emitted a small squawk. “I don’t know where to start, quite frankly.”
Rosa waited.
“I mean, there’s your proposed lead: ‘A new assault weapon announced by Breck Ammunition makes the statement that there is no such thing as overkill.’”
“Mm-hm?”
“Rosa, you do remember that Breck Ammunition owns Our Times?”
Rosa shook her head angrily. “I didn’t realize my assignment was to write an ad. I thought I was supposed to report the news.”
“News? This isn’t news. This … drivel … is editorial! You’re supposed to report the facts and only the facts. Leave it up to the reader to decide if the gun is overkill.”
Rosa sighed. “I’ll rewrite the lead.”
“What if you just said, ‘A new assault weapon announced by Breck Ammunition makes a statement,’ and then just leave it at that?”
Teeth gritted, Rosa seethed, “I’ll rewrite the lead.”
“It’s not just the lead. This entire recap of the hunt is overly gory, and you present it as if it’s some kind of junket designed to bribe you into writing nice things about Breck Ammo!”
She nearly laughed. That’s exactly what it was.
“In fact, I might just cut the hunt out of the story altogether. Just talk about the features of the gun and how the readers can make an order. In fact, I think you can also cut this whole section recapping how Gerard Breck took control of the company. That’s irrelevant to the story.”
Rosa’s jaw dropped. “Irrelevant? This was his first gun show as CEO!”
Rebecca sighed deeply. “I just don’t think it’s worth mentioning. Cut it out of the story, rewrite the rest as discussed and send it back to me w
ithin the hour so we can post the article. We’re already late on the story as it is. The gun blogs had this up last night and Breck Ammo is asking what happened to the national news article.”
The phone beeped. Rosa stared in disbelief at the message on the screen: Rebecca Song has ended the call.
“Bitch!” she screamed into the phone.
Composing herself, Rosa turned to her computer. She made a copy of the document, renamed it neutered gun show story and began her edit.
Well, not quite yet. First, another cup of coffee was in order. She stood frowning over the machine as it dripped brown liquid into a glass pitcher. A flare of morning sunlight through the window provided momentary perspective. Get through this stupid Our Times story … and then back to work on The New West.
She poured herself the coffee, added a splash of milk, and returned to her desk. It didn’t take long to dumb down most of the copy to Our Times standards, but she hesitated to delete the part about Gerard Breck’s takeover of Breck Ammunition.
He’d been in control of the company for less than a year, replacing his late stepfather, Albert, the company’s founder. Nobody had expected Gerard’s ascension; they figured Al’s blood child, Errol, would take over the company. But something unexpected happened — Errol disappeared.
She studied a picture of Errol and realized she’d seen him many times before in Our Times. He was handsome, in a pampered rich kind of way. He had an expertly groomed brown mustache and beard, and he smiled as though he hadn’t had to lift a finger his whole life. Perhaps the most notable thing about him were his eyes, piercing and green. There was a glamorous woman in his arms, too. She had stylish, shoulder-length blonde hair and wore a pink designer jacket. She had to be his wife.
He’d seemed to lead a pretty blessed life, so what happened? Rosa looked into that and found an obituary for Errol’s wife dated right around the time of his disappearance. Some men had broken into the house — burglars, the article claimed — and one of them shot her. Errol had missed his wife’s funeral. The Board of Breck Ammunition ordered a search, but nothing ever came of it. Officially, Errol was declared missing. A few days later, Gerard announced himself as the new CEO of Breck Ammunition.