Enemies and Other Western Stories
Page 8
He started crying, then, and I wanted to say something or do something to comfort him but I didn't know what.
I just listened to the owls in the woods, and rode on, with my own son next to me in handcuffs, toward the town that a hanging judge named Coughlin visited seven times a year, a town where the citizens turned hangings into civic events, complete with parades and picnics after.
"You really gonna let 'em hang me, Pa?" Karl said after a while, still crying, and sounding young and scared now. "You really gonna let 'em hang me?"
I didn't say anything. There was just the soughing wind.
"Ma woulda let me go if she was here. You know she would."
I just rode on, closer, ever closer to town. Three more hours. To make my mind up. To be sure.
"Pa, you can't let 'em hang me, you can't." He was crying again.
And then I realized that I was crying, too, as we rode on closer and closer and closer to where men with singing saws and blunt hard hammers and silver shining nails waited for another life to place on the altar of the scaffold.
"You gotta let me go, Pa, you just gotta," Karl said.
Three more hours and one way or another, it would all be over. Maybe I would change my mind, maybe not.
We rode on toward the dusty autumn hills.
About the Author
Ed Gorman is an award-winning American author best known for his crime and mystery fiction. His novel THE POKER CLUB was made into a film of the same name.
He has written under many pseudonyms including "E. J. Gorman" and "Daniel Ransom." He won a Spur Award for Best Short Fiction for his short story "The Face" in 1992. His fiction collection CAGES was nominated for the 1995 Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. His collection THE DARK FANTASTIC was nominated for the same award in 2001.
He has contributed to many magazines and other publications including Xero, Black Lizard, Cemetery Dance, the anthology Tales of Zorro, and many more.
Other Ed Gorman Books
Marshal Ben Tully arrives in Pine City to find a double tragedy waiting for him: a lynch mob has taken a suspected murderer out of Tully's jail and hanged him—and the murder victim is Tully's wife!
Even though he's almost overwhelmed with grief, Tully's instincts as a lawman take over when he uncovers evidence that the man who was lynched may not be the one who killed his wife. It seems that nearly everyone in Pine City has secrets they don't want exposed, and the identity of Kate Tully's murderer is one of them. Ben Tully's investigation plunges him into a web of deceit, lust, and more murder as he risks his life to discover the truth about his wife's death!
In LYNCHED, master storyteller Ed Gorman has written another compelling Western mystery full of action and suspense. AMAZON LINK
Ray Coyle hadn't been a real gunfighter for ten years, and that was the way he liked it. He would have been content to live out his life as a performer in a Wild West show. But then he got the news that his son was dead, killed in suspicious circumstances, and so Coyle set out to discover the truth. Coopersville was a town full of secrets, most of them ugly. Brutal ex-convict Harry Winston knows those secrets, many of them involving the wealthy Trevor family. And Harry wants not only money but also revenge on the Trevors. His plans are complicated by the arrival of Ray Coyle, who has a score of his own to settle with one of the Trevors . . . and for anybody to get what they want, blood will have to be spilled. Master storyteller Ed Gorman spins a dark, compelling tale of greed, lust, and murder in TROUBLE MAN, one of the best Western noir novels ever written, now available again from Rough Edges Press. Powerful, tragic, and deeply compassionate, Gorman's critically acclaimed stories and novels have made him one of today's leading authors of Western, crime, suspense, and horror fiction. Amazon Link
VENDETTA is an off kilter revenge novel; off kilter because it moves in unusual and unexpected ways (i. e. it isn’t necessarily a gun down and it is character rather than action driven). Joan Grieves’ father, Noah, is killed in a Dryden, Colorado bank by a man named Tom Rattigan. Noah Grieves was a wash out; he failed at ranching and mining, and when Rattigan offered him a job he took it. Unfortunately the paycheck came with a frame for embezzlement, and when Noah is released from prison he wants his pound of flesh. Noah’s death is the beginning, but the story is more about Joan Grieves—her journey for revenge—her surrogate parent Father Pete Madsen (who is the closest thing to a protagonist the story has), Tom Rattigan, Dryden’s police chief Walter Petty and Walter’s wife Caroline. In the end, the story is more about betrayal than revenge and it is very difficult to separate the good from the bad. VENDETTA is a beautifully complicated novel hiding in the skin of simplicity. The surface story—a father and then daughter seeking revenge—is simple, but the details, the unravelling of a town’s secrets and the exposure of the characters’ strengths and, more often, weaknesses is complicated and insightful. None of the characters are wholly bad, and none are wholly good. As an example one of the “bad” characters has a daughter with a port-wine stain birth mark on her face, and the love and sympathy he displays for his child is remarkable. The fun of the story is the revelation of who actually is the antagonist; basically the most miserable deceitful man in town (and it is something of a surprise when he is revealed). It is a race to the worst, but the characters’ motives are never dark and murky and are always explained and believable. This isn’t to say it is a dark story, but instead it is a story about human weakness, and more importantly redemption. Amazon Link
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