Bad Cowboy: Western Romance

by Amy Faye

  The one that worried me the most, though, was the assumption that Baron Euler could beat Franklin in a fair straight fist-fight. Baron was a tough guy, wiry, and carried himself like someone who knew a little bit about fighting. He held a pistol like it was an extension of his arm, and he might be able to reach out and punch someone with a bullet.

  He didn’t seem at all concerned about the fact that Franklin Durham was almost a head taller and near double his weight, and more of it muscle than not. It was like the whole thing didn’t even register in his mind. Like there was no reason to believe that someone very literally twice the man that he was might be able to take him in a fist fight.

  But it was always a risk. The whole situation was risky, and the only way to avoid the risk was to leave and for Baron to suddenly go straight after all these years.

  I let out a long, low breath and closed my eyes. There was a fourth thing that concerned me. But it wasn’t a worry. It would work, and I knew it would work. What I was concerned about wasn’t whether or not we could pull it off. It was whether or not I’d be able to look in a mirror in the morning, when we’d made it work.

  I looked at Baron. He raised his eyebrows.

  “You ready?”

  “Right now?”

  “When else? It’s late enough that nobody’ll see, and early enough you can find him.”

  “It can’t wait?”

  “You said it yourself. You wait too much longer, and there’s not going to be a later any more.”

  I pursed my lips and tried to scrub the guilt that was already building up in me. I wasn’t that kind of woman. I’m still not. And I’ve got to admit, I’m still a little ashamed of the story. But I had to do it. So I waited a minute, let Baron out the window, and started down the stairs.

  I put a little sway in my hips. It wasn’t as if I’d never seen a harlot before, after all. I could fake it well enough, I thought. And maybe I did. Maybe too well. I still cringe when I think of the whole thing.

  The men’s eyes laid on me the second that I walked into the room. They followed me silently as I walked over to Franklin Durham. He was sitting and drinking, a laughing smile on his lips, and he noticed me coming towards him right away.

  “You coming to be with a real man,” he halfway asked, leering and showing pointed canine teeth.

  “You want to talk about it outside?”

  He blinked and pushed the chair back, stood up, and looked down at the boys around the table, laughing.

  “Outside? To talk?”

  I gave him a suggestive look and leaned my head. “We don’t have to talk if you have… something else that you wanted to do.”

  I don’t know if it was my performance or the drink, but as far as I can tell, he didn’t question me for a second. He just wrapped one big, thick, hairy arm around my shoulders and guided me out the front door. I took him around the corner, into a dark alley.

  To his credit, Baron didn’t sucker punch him. He gave Franklin plenty of time to see the ambush coming, and to this day, I still don’t know whether or not that was a mistake.

  Eighteen

  It wasn’t until afterward that I understood what happened in the fight. It played out in the space of only a few seconds; the alley was dark, but not so dark that I had trouble seeing the pair of them moving.

  What was hard to understand was why Baron, who needed to be on the aggressive, and needed to beat the other man halfway into Hell, waited. The silence seemed to last forever. It might have been ten seconds, but the entire fight afterward would barely last half so long.

  Franklin took the first swing. It was a wide, swinging thing, and I had little doubt that it could have knocked down a full-grown maple tree if it connected solidly enough. This wasn’t the trained boxing of the man at the fair. Nor was it the controlled attack of a man who knew that he’d never be welcomed back if he broke some poor farmer’s jaw.

  Baron ducked forward, into the blow. I watched with my mouth slack and my heartbeat stopped entirely. I felt like I was about to watch Baron get himself killed in one hit, like a man who had been hit by a passing train. And then at the last moment his weight shifted further to the left, outside the swing, and it sailed ineffectively past his nose, so close that the hairs on the back of Franklin’s arm must have rubbed Euler’s cheek.

  Baron twisted wickedly and caught Franklin with the point of his fist. He twisted back the other way in the space of an instant, stepping even closer. This time it wasn’t the point of his fist that drove deep into Franklin Durham’s cheek. His elbow spiked into the bigger man’s teeth. I heard an awful cracking noise, and Baron stayed standing, already pulling back his foot for a massive kick as Durham fell.

  It had been impossible to win. There was simply no way. Four things that had to all go right, and they had all been long shots. At least, that was what I had thought. Because as Euler brought his leg forward, I could see that there wasn’t even an ounce of worry in his eyes. Nor was there any relief, for that matter.

  All that his face showed was anger. Anger at being challenged, like some kind of animal. Another crunch sounded as the knee collided with Franklin’s face as he fell. He slumped into the ground, and I felt relief flooding through me even more fully. And then it was gone, replaced with the feeling of two pairs of arms wrapping around my arms and pulling me back, off my feet.

  The arms held me up. And someone stepped forward. A woman, I saw. Leanne’s voice was hard and low.

  “You better cut that out, Baron.”

  He stopped mid-kick. Franklin was still squirming on the ground, refusing to stop trying to get himself up. When Baron stopped he grabbed at the smaller man’s blue jeans and tried to haul himself up that way. Baron stepped back, and Franklin fell down again.

  “Leanne.”

  “You’ve been gone a long time,” she said. Her husky voice was harder than I’d ever heard it. I tried to struggle back to my feet, but every time I almost managed to get my weight back on my legs I was pulled back off of them. “You should have stayed gone.”

  “You and Franklin?”

  Her back was to me, now. She reached down and Franklin took her hand.

  “We needed someone to be in charge around here. I found someone.”

  “I’m in charge.”

  “Yeah? For how long? How much time do we wait for you to come back? You think we’d hear about it if you were arrested? If you died?”

  “It was a straightforward couple of jobs.”

  “Three months,” she said. “Three months, you’re hitting banks. How long before the Federales start looking? It’s not like there’s a coward among us. But you’re going to get yourself killed, assuming you don’t get the rest of us killed.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means like what it sounds like. You take your share. We’re not here to cheat you. Take your woman.”

  “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”

  Something pressed against my throat. It was colder than the night air. And it was hard, and it was sharp. It hurt.

  “You’re not going to stay, Baron. Get out of here, while you still can.”

  She reached into her front pocket and pulled something free. I heard the sound of the hammer clicking before I saw the pistol in her hands. It must have been reversed for Baron, but he stood still. Maybe he wasn’t sure what to do, or maybe some part of him had decided that he wasn’t going to hit a woman. Not even if she was forcing him out of his home.

  “Fine,” he said finally. “I’ll go.”

  “And don’t come back,” Leanne said softly. The pistol stayed leveled at his chest, but she turned to me. I watched Baron. If he was going to do anything, it had to be now. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted him to. I was afraid. “You’re free to stay here, if you want to. I’m not condemning you to staying with Baron if you don’t want it.”

  “I’m going with him,” I said. “I don’t have any place here.”

  “I could find somethin
g for you,” Leanne said. Talking to me, she almost sounded conciliatory. Like she was sorry that it had to work out this way, but it was the way that it had to be.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and she nodded.

  “Okay. You go. Get your things. Bring his as well. Take as long as you need, but you’re not staying here.”

  “Don’t kill him,” I said. I tried not to sound like I was begging, but I can’t say that I wasn’t.

  “No,” she agreed. “I won’t kill him. We all owe him that much, at least.”

  Franklin rubbed at his jaw, but he nodded in agreement. The knife pulled away from my throat, and the arms holding me fast lifted me up off the ground. I got my feet under me, and I walked as quick as I could. Everyone was watching, and everyone knew what was happening. So I didn’t waste time.

  I got his things, and I got what few belongings I had to my name, and I wandered over to the stable for the horses. Someone had them saddled and ready. So I shucked the stuff into Baron’s saddlebags, and I went back over to the knot of mutiny.

  I should have felt bad. I should have seen everything that was going to come after. But neither one happened, in spite of myself.

  Nineteen

  They promised that we could leave together. I believed them. Of course I did. What other choice did I have, precisely? I swallowed my fear, and I packed up Baron onto his horse. I tried to keep my gaze level as I watched him climb up. I fit my foot into my own stirrup. And then my foot settled into the stirrup and I lifted up. And then we started to ride.

  I don’t know where Baron was thinking we would go. I don’t know what he thought I thought. There was a question in my mind of whether or not he would actually be able to leave. I wasn’t sure. And I’m still not sure whether or not he could bring himself to let them take the gang away from him. Maybe he thought that he could, for my sake. Or maybe he thought that he’d put me somewhere while he ran off.

  I didn’t get the chance to find out. I forced myself to stay upright in the saddle, too tired from the day to really feel prepared for the world around me. Too tired to make it as far as another city, as far as I could tell. But I didn’t have any other choice. It was leave or get myself killed, and I wasn’t ready to get myself killed.

  The town was a tight knot of people in a playground of empty buildings. So there was a lot of space where nobody stayed, nobody lived, and there wasn’t anybody around. We were out of the lived-in portion within a matter of two minutes. Almost five minutes after that, we had made it to the edge of what used to be Perdition. I was leaning on my arms, stiff-elbowed and holding me away from the ground.

  It was the best that I could hope for in the circumstances, and it was only going to get worse as the night went on. I did what I had to do, which was to pretend that it was just another five minutes.

  I didn’t see anything. I felt it before I saw it, and then I was reacting like a horse swishing its tail at flies, pure instinct with nothing else to back it up. I wish I could think that made a difference, but I suspect it didn’t.

  The rope was pulled taut across the road, caught me across the chest, and I twisted in the saddle to pull out of it. I think I let out a yell, but I was half-asleep, and I might have imagined it. Either way, Baron must have heard something. He wheeled his horse around, and started back toward me. Maybe he thought, at that point, I’d just fallen off the horse.

  A shot rang out. He let out a groan and fell off the horse, and his shifted off to the side as his weight pulled it. I watched him fall in slow-motion. In the pitch-darkness of the night, a pair of figures stepped out, wrapped their arms around me and started dragging. I kicked at them. They pulled.

  “Sorry,” the man holding my left side growled. “That’s just how it goes.”

  They walked for a long time. I assumed that at some point, I would be set back down and made to walk for myself. Baron wouldn’t have bothered to carry me all that way. I don’t know whether that was out of fundamental respect for me, or because he thought that I needed to pull my own weight. There was nothing romantic about the way I was being carried.

  By the time we reached lit streets again, my joints hurt so bad that I couldn’t imagine. It was almost a blessing when they dropped me on the rough wooden floors of the saloon, where I’d left only twenty minutes before, with a plan and a future and hope that things might not go wrong. I thought wrong then. I thought that they were going to kill me.

  Of course, it would have been easier to kill me in the street, so I should have thought better. Call it the naivete of youth. Then I started to think about other things that they could be planning instead, and I decided that shot dead in the street might have been preferable.

  Leanne was standing behind the bar. Her shoulders were slumped with tiredness or sadness or both, and she was massaging the thick glass of a handled mug. She set it down after a moment and let out a long, low breath.

  “I’m sorry you had to be a part of that, sweetheart.”

  I tried to lift myself up from the floor. A boot pressed between my shoulder blades, with no particular regard for the way that it painfully smashed my breasts into the floorboards.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not going to be leaving.”

  “You said—”

  “And I lied,” Leanne snapped. “I don’t need you to tell me that I lied about it, girl. But that’s how it’s going to be. So get comfortable with it. We’re not going to do nothin’ to you. Not unless you deserve it. But you’re going to be staying here. And that’s how it’s going to be. No funny stuff. We clear?”

  I let my head lower down until it pressed into the floor. I could see the grain of the wood where it had started to go ragged with the lack of humidity.

  “Can I at least get off the floor, then?”

  Twenty

  I wish that I could say that I spent the first hours of captivity waiting with baited breath for Baron to come and save me. He was the only man I’d ever had any feelings towards, aside from my brother. I’d given a lot to him.

  But I didn’t wait. Because I’d seen him die. Some part of me was certain that he would find some way, but another part was certain that he wouldn’t. I did what I had to do, instead. I slept and I kept my mind clear and I tried to feel better in the morning.

  I wasn’t sure who I could trust, not any more. Something in my gut told me, though, that Joanne had no intention of hurting me. If I could prove that to myself, then I had nothing to be particularly afraid of. I kept repeating that to myself.

  All I had to do was ingratiate myself to my new hosts, and everything would work itself out. I’d be safe enough, and I’d make it through. Eventually, I would get clear, or I would find some place for myself here.

  I slept the hours away, and I woke with the determination to get myself to safety somehow. The beds were hard and not particularly comfortable, but I’d been up late, and I woke rested. Pushed myself up from the mattress, and pushed away the questions in the back of my mind, whether or not Baron was going to be back soon.

  Of course he wasn’t. His body had fallen to the dirt, and I was on my own here, out in the desert. That was my life now. Get used to it.

  I was surprised to find someone waiting outside my room. He had his chair leaning back like he’d been dozing. The instant that I opened the door, the front two legs of the chair clattered to the ground and he stood. He didn’t reach for his gun, which was my split-second guess at what he was going to do. So at least in that sense, I guess things could have gone worse.

  “Miss Young,” he said, touching his head. “Joanne, ah… Miss Joanne wanted to see you.”

  I was taken downstairs. She had a list of things to do. It was busywork, and I’d done a fair bit of it before. There was no explanation; I needed something to do, and they were going to find it for me. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, after all.

  I didn’t question it, and nobody paid me special attention. I suppose that I ought to have been pleased to be
left to my own devices. I can’t say that I wasn’t. I felt numb. The world around me made sure that I continued to feel that way. And that was how I passed the first day. The second day, I passed slow, too. By the end of the third day, working almost ten hours a day, I was fairly confident that I had the common room as clean as it could get.

  And along with it, I had fairly convinced myself that Baron wasn’t going to surprise me. I’d refused to expect it the first day, but there was always a part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop. A part that I made sure to keep to myself, and even afterward I was careful not to admit to.

  The second day, it felt less like expectation and more like a fantasy. Wouldn’t it be funny if Baron showed back up to rescue me?

  By the third day, it wasn’t even that. It was an idea I’d had once, and it was past the point where it could be anything more.

  By the eighth day, I had settled into my routine. I would clean up, eat lunch, and during the afternoon hours I would go find someplace new to start in on. A day’s work, and I could usually move on to someplace new.

  It was dark, and the day’s slowly-dwindling imagination that there was going to be a daring rescue and a way home had already turned its lights off, as the sun fell.

  And then, not far away, there was a massive roar of an explosion, and everything started to go crazy. I stayed in my seat and tore another piece off of my bread.

  There was no reason to get all up in arms. Eventually, I’d understand what was happening, and afterward I would be able to piece it back together again in my head, as if I had seen what happened. But I didn’t. I saw what I thought I needed to see, which in my case was nothing.

  The first man to step through the door, I saw go because my seat was facing it. I was sitting alone at the table in the corner, the furthest from the door. It was more interesting to face towards the room than towards the wall, so I was facing towards the door, as well. He didn’t re-enter, and another gunshot rang out.