by Nick Cutter
“Maybe you and the Englishman can work together?” Appleton had suggested.
Minerva demurred. More precisely, she’d said: “I’d rather fall off the roof of a whorehouse and catch my eyelid on a nail.”
She had plans for both men.
Micah Shughrue was all business.
The Englishman? That was entirely personal.
4
MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE encountered the Englishman in Trotter’s Stables at the end of Mogollon’s ramshackle main street around midmorning.
Mogollon was a scratch-ass town of less than two thousand souls. It was afflicted with the same leprosy as a lot of these decaying New Mexico boomtowns. A century ago, men had descended upon the area to pan for gold and silver. Claptrap camps went up to service the prospectors—saloons with faro tables, brothels, joints where men spent the gold dust sieved out of the rivers. But nobody was really from a place like Mogollon, and when the gold dried up, towns like it mostly emptied out. Now all that remained was a shell, hollowed out, populated by those too stupid or lazy to move someplace better.
Micah had taken a room at the Two Points, the only motel in town. He did not sleep, but even on a normal night, Micah slept only a few hours. He had flicked on the black-and-white Zenith and watched until the Indian’s head came on and the words beneath it read: Your Local News at 7 AM! When dawn broke over the swaybacked roofs of Mogollon, he dressed in fresh clothes and holstered his pistol inconspicuously and made his way to a coffeehouse that was just opening. He drank bad coffee and ate a honey bun that tasted too much like the Camels the man behind the counter smoked, but still, he ate another as he read a big-city newspaper cover to cover. He scanned the street every so often. The town awoke sluggishly; nobody seemed to have much to do or any intensity about them.
He spotted a man walking down the opposite sidewalk in the direction of the horse stables. Micah had heard about a black pistolman with long ladylike hair and English manners. The exact sort of man Appleton might have hired.
Micah ordered another coffee to go and carried his paper cup out onto the street. He tucked his body behind a wooden column propping up the veranda and watched the black man disappear into the stables. He crossed the street and tossed his coffee cup behind a shrub. The street was thinly trafficked, only a mother pushing a stroller down the opposite sidewalk.
Micah unholstered his gun and eased around the open stable door. It was dim; feathery shafts of sunlight slipped through the wooden slats, picking up a patina of dust. The air smelled of hay and of horseflesh. The Englishman was bent at the feet of a horse. He seemed to be examining a malady on its hoof. He made a sweet clicking noise that came from deep in his throat. Micah slipped behind another horse ten feet away from the man.
“Hello,” he said.
At first, the Englishman remained bent at the horse’s feet, its hoof clasped in his hands. Then he shook his head in a slow side-to-side as if chastising himself. When he stood and turned, his own pistol was drawn. He was met by the sight of Micah, the majority of his body—his center of mass, as a rifle instructor would say—shielded by a dappled roan. Micah was aiming his Colt at the man from under the horse’s belly.
“Ahem,” said the man, “you’ve put me in a spot, old bean.”
It was him. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. And he was right: all he had was a tricky shot at Micah’s head or his legs. Micah had the Englishman’s whole body to hit.
Of course, Micah knew that the Englishman must have already considered simply shooting the horse. But the bullets would craze through the beast’s heavy vitals, or be flattened on its bones. A gut-shot horse would buck and fuss, giving the Englishman an opportunity, but there was a much better chance that Micah would irrigate his opponent’s chest well before that.
Micah said, “I have never met a black man with straight hair. How do you do it?”
“Relaxer,” the Englishman said. “Enough to float a coal ship.”
The horse’s cock slipped from its sheath. Micah could not see its entire length due to his positioning, but what he glimpsed put him in the mind of a thick rubber hose. Not quite a fireman’s hose, girthwise, but not far off. Micah angled his gun away from the horse’s comically large member. He did not want to accidentally blow a hole through it.
“I will not lie,” the Englishman said, looking at it. “I feel unmanned. It’s not good to feel that way before a gunfight.”
“It is an animal. Our anatomies do not square up.”
“You make a good point. And yet—”
The horse pissed. Long and loud and luxurious. Droplets of urine splashed up to wet Micah’s trousers.
“My God,” the Englishman marveled. “Do you think it’s been given a diuretic?”
The horse finished. It shook contentedly and began to eat hay. This interlude having concluded, the men returned to their own business.
Micah said, “I take it Appleton hired you?”
“He did. He claims you killed two of his men.”
“I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.”
“Bully for you.”
“And you?”
The Englishman said, “I hunt people for money. I imagine most of them have been bad eggs, but I never bothered to read their diaries.”
Bold was the man who could joke with a pistol pointed at his belly.
“It’s a job to me, nothing more,” the Englishman went on. “But according to Appleton, you’ve been asking for it.”
“Who of us is not asking for it?”
“So then, why not let it go?”
“Appleton dealt me a bad turn,” Micah said simply. “I will not be done wrong.”
“Ah. You’re one of those.”
Micah set his jaw. The Englishman did not know about the baby with no arms. Micah had dreamed about that child. She was the reason, more or less, why he had to kill Appleton. He could even set aside Appleton’s treachery in dry-gulching him. That was business. But Micah hoped he’d sleep better with Appleton gone.
For this reason, he did not wish to shoot the Englishman. Not because he was scared of the man’s skills. The Englishman was a trained killer, but Micah had his own abilities in that area. He was not anxious about taking out the Englishman on moral grounds, either—he had murdered for lesser cause, sadly.
No, Micah didn’t want to fire on the Englishman because something might occur during the course of events to stop him from finishing what he’d come to Mogollon to do, that being to kill Seaborn Appleton. Kill him for that little baby with no arms.
Such was Micah’s mind-set when a woman rushed into the stable with two pistols drawn and firing.
For a split second, Micah assumed she was an apparition. He used to have similar visions when drunk, though in those, the woman was stepping naked out of a lake or naked into a bedroom—in any event, naked. But this woman was clothed in a duster the color of old fingernails and alligator-skin boots. She carried a pair of Colts that kicked skyward as she squeezed the triggers.
The stabled horses reared at the deafening gunshots. The roan slammed into Micah, knocking the wind out of him. His gun fell to the dirt. He saw the Englishman catch a slug through his shoulder. It reeled him in a sloppy pirouette. Micah grunted and knelt for his gun, spinning toward the woman—a girl, really—to return fire as the horses stampeded out the stable doors. His bullet struck a post near her head, spraying splinters. She flinched at the flying wood and fired ploddingly from the hip.
Minerva couldn’t have hoped for better luck. She had been sitting in her car scoping the main drag when, at precisely ten o’clock, she’d spotted the English twit. At two past ten, Micah Shughrue followed the British fuck into the stable. Two bugs in the kill jar. She had a mind to let them shoot each other dead, but that would not satisfy her. She had to flatline the Englishman. He would have to die first; he struck her as the sharper shot. Once he was dead, or at least down, she could focus on Shughrue.
But things began to spin out of control
the moment she stepped into the stables. She’d intended to surprise them. Unsporting? Granted. But she needed every advantage against such experienced gunmen. Minerva expected to take return fire. She might even be hit. But she could withstand that, she figured.
This belief had persisted up until the moment the bullets began to sing through the air. When she charged into the stables, everything sped up. She pulled the triggers and could feel the Colts’ hammers cocking back as the springs compressed. She could even feel the firing pins strike the flash holes, igniting the powder in each round. But her own movements were lethargic—her veins running with molasses, her arms leaden.
Oh Christ oh Christ, she thought. This is happening too goddamn fast—
Micah Shughrue saw this woman coming and he did not blink. He thumbed the hammer of his own Colt and put his first shot into the Englishman’s side. Gray smoke mushroomed from the barrel; the Englishman’s tailored shirt blew inward, then out again as the bullet jolted through his innards. Turning then, his mind clear and his breath quickening, Micah fired at the woman, whom he assumed to be the Englishman’s partner despite the fact that she was firing at the Englishman, determinedly so, her lips skinned from her teeth. His bullet winged her left leg down at the calf. She continued to advance, teeth bared and wolfish, her Colts thundering.
In the midst of all this, the Englishman sat confused. A rare inertia gripped his mind. Such sudden violence when he had been anticipating a gentlemanly tête-à-tête, followed by him dispatching Micah Shughrue and collecting Appleton’s reward. But then . . . this harridan. An appalling harpy with murder on her mind. At once he had been winged; moments later, he was hit again, this time by Shughrue. Only then did he pull his pistol and take aim at the murderess. A bullet whizzed past his skull, making the sound of an angry hornet. One of his own bullets struck her. She collapsed behind the water trough . . .
Minerva crumpled behind the trough, clutching her belly. It felt as if she’d been kicked by a donkey, and yet there was no real pain—only the sudden and somehow blunt force of impact. The fact blitzed through her brainpan: I’ve been hit! She’d never been shot before. So this was how it felt. She had expected worse. All she sensed was a cold disconnect between her chest and legs, like a bunch of threads had been cut.
Miraculously, Micah Shughrue was unhurt. The Englishman had eaten considerable lead, and the woman, too. Micah could see the black man on his back with blood running out of his shirt. A fine layer of dust and hay was stuck to his face.
“Oh,” the Englishman said. “Gents, I am killed.”
“I’m sorry for shooting you like that,” Micah said to him. “It was not my intent.”
Micah approached the trough. The woman lay behind it, grasping her side and retching. He turned back to see the Englishman sitting up. Too late, he noticed the dainty derringer clutched in his hand—
The lead ball struck Micah in the left eye. He fell straight back. A fine mist of blood hung in the air. He knew nothing else.
5
MICAH AWOKE BLIND.
He sat up with a jolt. Where was he? His final memory: the Englishman’s bullet snapping his skull back, followed by a terrible squelch inside his head.
He lay on a threadbare mattress, or so it felt. He could tell he was naked save for a pair of underwear.
Sightless.
An icy thread of fear spun around his heart. What goddamn use was a blind gunman? Forget killing Appleton—if he was blind, he could be killed by a child. A beggar could sneak up and slit his throat.
His fingers spidered up his chest, his face . . . he felt the bandages wound over his eyes. He unraveled them. Oh, thank Christ. He could see. He blinked. His view improved. He was in a makeshift infirmary. White privacy curtains were draped around his bed. He ran his fingertips around his right eye socket, the eye he could see out of. His fingers investigated the left eye next, figuring that the eyelid was gummed shut with blood or was otherwise occluded—
His index finger pushed past the sagging lids and into the sticky vault where his eye had recently resided. His fingertip grazed the raw flesh at the back where the nerves collected. He gasped.
“Christ, careful what you’re doing!”
A man had stepped through the curtains. He wore a much-bloodied shirt and a hat with a beaten crown. Needles of sweaty hair protruded under its wide brim.
“Quit poking at it. It’ll get infected, turn to sepsis. And you see, I can’t very well amputate your head. That would be what you call a terminal decision.”
“You a doctor?” said Micah.
“Who the hell else would I be? Who else goes around fixing shot-up morons?”
“You took the eye?”
The doctor nodded. “I took the eye.”
Both men were silent a spell.
“It does not hurt,” said Micah. “It . . . tingles.”
“I flushed the socket with a numbing agent and gave you a shot for the pain. But you’ll feel it soon enough. It won’t be pleasant.”
“Did you have to take my eye, Doc?”
The doctor removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. His hands were stained with blood the way a mechanic’s hands can get with axle grease—the skin takes on the tincture of the substance that he works with all day.
“I am no surgeon. I administer to the men and women around here, most of them farmers or ranchers. If a hand gets crushed and we can’t get them to the hospital two towns over, I take it off. A foot mangled, off it comes. Better to lose a limb than die of septic shock.” He reseated his hat. “Your eye was obliterated, Mr. Shughrue—yes, I know who you are. The bullet glanced off your ocular ridge—the bone, I mean to say—and dodged around inside the socket. A lucky break; otherwise it would have passed through into your brain. Then all you’d be good for is drooling.”
“How did you remove it?”
“You really want to know?”
“Tell me.”
“A tool called a curette,” the doctor said. “A sharpened spoon, pretty much. I scooped it out, snipped the nerve. The eye was smashed fruit. Useless even as a decoration.”
The doctor possessed little in the way of bedside manner, but Micah was grateful for his candor.
“You could be fitted for a fake one, Mr. Shughrue. Or a patch.”
“Maybe I will keep it the way it is,” said Micah, filled with momentary despair. “Or have a flagpole jut out of it with a little flag at the end, the Stars and Stripes like the kids wave at parades.”
“It would be patriotic of you,” the doctor said dryly.
Micah pulled his knees to his chest. He was sore but otherwise unhurt. “The black fellow?”
The doctor said, “He’ll pull through. He was shot through the hip and shoulder. No organ damage.”
“Where is he?”
The doctor gestured to the other side of the curtains. Micah craned his head toward the bedpost, where he always hung his pistols—
“They’ve been confiscated,” the doctor said, sensing the intent. “The other fella’s, too. Now, you could get up and try choking him to death, but I’d tell the deputy stationed outside and he’d shoot you dead.”
“I will stay here, then.”
“That’s a good boy.”
“The woman?”
“She’s here also,” the doctor told him. “She’s hurt. She won’t be bothering anyone.”
“Who is she?”
“A bounty hunter, I’m told.” A chuckle. “Not worth a damn at her job, though, is she?”
Micah leaned back in bed. “So?”
“You’ll all live. You will all go to jail. You and the black man for the rest of your natural lives. The woman might get out just in time to start collecting Social Security. From what I gather, you have dodged the law a long time, Mr. Shughrue. Now you’re going to have to pay the ferryman.” He shrugged. “I hear tell you might even get the electric chair.”
“So why recommend a fake eye for me? It will just melt out of my head!” Micah l
aughed until a tear came out of his good eye. Something might have squirted out of his empty socket, too, but he couldn’t tell. “Hell of a thing, Doc. Healing me up so I can be fried.”
The doctor allowed himself a small smile in acknowledgment of how ludicrous his task must seem. He then drew liquid morphine into a syringe. “I’ll give you this so you can sleep.”
“But Doctor, is it habit-forming?”
The sawbones chortled at this. He administered the shot and squared his hat to Micah. “Get some rest.”
6
MICAH AWOKE THAT NIGHT to the Englishman’s voice.
“Ho! You awake over there?”
Micah waited until his eyes—his eye—adjusted to the darkness. “I am up. What the hell do you want?”
“Are you mobile?” the Englishman asked.
“I can get around.”
“Wunderbar. I, however, am confined to bed rest.”
Micah sat up. A needle was jabbed into his forearm, feeding some manner of medical mixture into his veins. The needle ran to a tube, which in turn ran to a glass bottle hooked to an IV pole on casters.
Micah shuffled through the curtains; the casters squeaked as the pole rolled along. The world felt strange with only one eye. It was as if Micah’s body had already accepted that the eye was gone and was in the process of reorganizing itself to account for its loss.
The Englishman lay in a hospital bed, his head slightly raised, his long dark tresses fanned over the pillow—the ends were frizzing, reverting to their natural state.
“You got me,” he said.
“I apologized for that already,” said Micah.
“Really? I can’t recall. In any case, you shouldn’t. Pistols were drawn, yes? I would have done the same to you were it not for that madwoman.”
“You did her wrong?”
The Englishman frowned. “I’ve never laid eyes on that batty witch.”