by Ed Gorman
He wanted to cry and needed to cry, but he could not cry. There were just those few tears. All he could do was kneel beside her body and make that baying sound and rock back and forth as if the swaying relieved the grief that gripped him.
He just wished that she had uttered a single word to him in their years together.
He just wished he knew what that word would have been.
He was wondering about this when he heard the horses on the rise to the west.
He turned and saw two riders silhouetted against the moon and the ink-blue sky.
Chapter Twenty-five
Guild said, “You want to call out to him?”
“Thomas?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want him taking any shots at me. I want you to tell him I’ve got a gun on you and I plan to use it.”
“Thomas won’t want me to die.”
“Good,” Guild said. “Then I won’t have to kill you.” He was tired and he was cold. In weather like this it was easy for the infirmities of age to begin their tireless work on you, sinus trouble in the nose and constipation in the bowels. He wanted in this wind and this night to get the little girl and the robbery money and take them back to their rightful places.
As they came down the hill, the deep shadows of the trees playing gamely across the blue snow, Guild said, “Call out.”
Still shackled to the saddlehorn, James Bruckner couldn’t cup his hands to shout, so he merely threw back his head and began bellowing.
“You don’t shoot now, hear, Thomas? ‘Cause Mr. Guild’s got a gun on me. Hear?”
Even in the gloom Guild could see his burned face. The poor bastard, Guild thought. Even in the shadows he didn’t look like other people.
They made earnest progress through the deep snow, the horses tiring easily, and as they drew even closer, Guild said again, “Call out one more time.”
“Wind takes your voice right away, don’t it?” James Bruckner said.
Guild nodded for him to yell again.
They were maybe thirty yards away from the cabin when the door burst open, and silhouetted there in the lamplight was the unmistakable form of Harry Kriker.
He had his rifle, and he said only one thing: “You and your brother killed the little girl!”
“Killed her?” James Bruckner started to say.
But Kriker didn’t give him any time, no time at all.
Kriker charged through the snow right toward the horses, and he shot James Bruckner clean in the face.
Bruckner’s body wanted to fall off the saddle, but the cuffs kept him hanging there.
Kriker went over and started kicking Bruckner in the ribs.
Guild came around the horse and brought the butt of his rifle down hard on the back of Kriker’s head.
He was amazed that the blow merely staggered Kriker, didn’t knock him out at all.
Kriker spun, his rifle ready.
“They killed the girl.”
“I’m sorry, Kriker.”
“They took the girl and they killed her.”
He was shouting, he was crying, he was crazy. He pumped another bullet into the dead man.
“He’s dead already, Kriker.”
Kriker sobbed, then turned back to Guild.
“They killed the girl,” he said.
“I doubt they meant to. They didn’t seem the kind. Not really.”
Kriker’s eyes were something Guild could not bear to see.
“You defendin’ them?”
“No. I’m just sayin’ it was probably an accident is all.” He paused. “You’ll have to go back along with the money.”
“What?” Kriker said.
“I’m afraid so.”
Kriker cocked the rifle. “You try to take me in, bounty man, and we’re both gonna die. Right here and right now.”
“I don’t want to have to kill you,” Guild said.
“You can’t kill me.”
“You haven’t been keeping track of your bullets.”
“The hell.”
“You haven’t.”
“I got two rounds left.”
“You got no rounds left.”
Kriker hesitated just long enough for Guild to raise the butt of his rifle and bring it down again on the side of Kriker’s face.
This time Guild got a pure clean shot at Kriker’s temple, and that made a good deal of difference.
Kriker collapsed on the ground.
Guild took the horses around the back of the cabin where they’d be out of the woods, and then he went to the side of the cabin and looked at the dead girl, and then he dragged Kriker inside the cabin. He had taken his last pair of handcuffs from his saddlebag. He cuffed Kriker to the chair. Guild figured Decker and his men would soon be here.
Kriker came awake ten minutes later. Blood was matted in his hair. He looked like an old animal that was dying out his time in confusion and some inexplicable despair.
They sat in the cabin and Guild read a Yankton newspaper from three years ago detailing the Territory’s plans to start a mandatory educational system, an idea that was not meeting with a great deal of favor.
Kriker said, “I want to go see the girl.”
A thin wind came up, swirling the snow like topsoil. The wind was musical. In Indian legend it was said that this particular kind of music could only be heard over cursed soil or death ground. Given all the people who had died in the past two days, the notion seemed to have a particular relevance.
“I want to go see her.”
“Wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“I don’t give a damn she’s dead, Guild. I just want to see her.”
Guild sighed and put down his paper. “You believe in God?”
“No.”
“Then I can’t help you much, I guess.”
“You gonna tell me about the angels?”
“I was gonna tell you to calm down.”
“You don’t know how much I loved her.”
“I think I can guess.”
“I just want to go see her.”
“I just want you to stay put.”
He started crying then, and Guild had to look away. The sound Kriker made was harsh, and Guild would remember it for a long time.
“You really gonna take me in?”
“I got to, Kriker.”
“They’ll just hang me.”
“That isn’t up to me.”
“I didn’t kill Rig or Tolliver.”
“No, but you killed other people before.”
“I don’t want to die that way.”
“What way?”
“In public and all. Them ladies in their fancy hats standin’ down there and glarin’ up at you.”
“I don’t have any choice, Kriker.”
“You could let me go.”
“No.”
“You could say I escaped.”
“No.”
He didn’t say anything then for a long time, and Guild rattled the newspaper back into reading shape and put an unlit cigar in his mouth and went back to reading.
Kriker said, “I got a Colt inside my sheepskin pocket. Belonged to Thomas Bruckner.”
Guild put down the paper, curious. “Why would you tell me that? Why wouldn’t you try to use it to escape?”
“Because I don’t want to escape.”
“You want me to take the gun?”
“No, not that either.”
“Then what?”
Kriker sighed. “Some ways, we’re alike.”
“I suspect that’s true.”
“You had some learnin’, didn’t you?”
“Some. Not a lot.”
“You speak fine.”
“Worked for a marshal once who was real high on books.”
“He real high on dignity?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning them ladies in their fancy hats lookin’ up at you.”
Guild was just starting to catch on. He did not feel s
o bright. It had taken him a long and laborious time to catch on.
Just at dawn Guild went outside the cabin and peed in the snow. There was just enough light that the urine was yellow in the white snow.
The shot came just after.
Chapter Twenty-six
Guild went in and took the cuffs off Kriker, and then he heaved Kriker up on his shoulders and carried him outside and laid him out next to the girl. In the morning now you could hear dogs and you could hear distant bawling cattle.
Kriker had done a good clean job of it. There was a hole, a messy one, in the back of his head. Guild wondered if he had been afraid. Guild would have been afraid.
Without quite knowing why, Guild knelt down next to Kriker and took the dead man’s hand and placed it over the heart of the little girl.
Then he started digging snow up with both his hands, and he covered them good, the two of them, and then he stood up and looked out on the unfurling white land. There was blue sky and a full yellow sun. Warmer now, there was even that kind of sweetness that comes on sunny winter days. It made him think of pretty women on ice skates, their cheeks touched perfect red by the cold, their eyes daring and blue.
He did not look back at Kriker and the girl. They were done, and Guild had enough ghosts inside him. He did not need more.
He had to pee again—he always got this way after terrible things—and then he went to his saddlebags and got some jerky and then he went inside and picked up the paper again and finally lit up the cigar.
Decker and his men came and, of course being parents themselves, made much of the little girl. One man got sick and one man started to cry.
What Decker mostly wanted to know about, standing there inside the cabin with Guild, was how something like this could have happened.
“How the hell’d he get a gun and kill himself that way?”
All Guild said was, “Damned if I know.”
Ten minutes later they packed the little girl across the rump of one horse and Kriker across the rump of another, and then they set out the long white distance back to the town.
Chapter Twenty-seven
When they got in, Decker told Guild to come around in the morning for the reward money. He still did not sound happy that the town had been cheated out of a hanging. In Yankton, Guild thought, in those law courses Decker had taken, they’d probably taught him that folks just naturally liked a hanging every now and then, and here Guild had gone and robbed him of it.
Guild went over to the house he’d been at the other night. He asked for the straw-haired girl. She came out from behind the blue chenille curtains downstairs wearing the same gingham dress and the shoes one size too big. The way they forced her to walk, with sort of a girlish but fetching lack of grace, made him think she was even more of a kid than she was.
The madam put a hand on Guild’s arm and led him off to the side. She was a skinny woman who wore hard pink mascara like a death mask. “She ain’t real reliable, truth to tell.” She nodded to a woman who looked much as the madam must have looked twenty years earlier. “Whyn’t you taken Aberdeen over there?”
Guild shrugged. “Straw-haired one’s fine.”
Upstairs he said, “Mind if I blow out that kerosene lamp?”
“I done it twice last night, but I don’t feel like doin’ it tonight. That’s why Patty’s so mad at me.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“About the lamp?”
“About the lamp.”
“I don’t care if you blow it out.”
So he blew it out and then he went over and sat in the rocking chair that faced the street below. You could see stars, and closer to the glass of the window you could see snow. The wind came in torrents and the glass rattled, and through the cracks you could feel cold. There was laughter in the next room but it sounded sad.
He said, “Would you sit on my lap?”
She said, “Mister, you really should’ve taken Aberdeen.”
“You ever answer a question directly?”
“I sit on your lap?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all you want me to do?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t charge you, then.”
“One other thing, too.”
“I figured.”
“Don’t talk.”
“What?”
“Don’t say anything. Just sit on my lap and don’t say anything. Don’t say anything at all.”
“Okay.” For the first time, she sounded hesitant, maybe even a little afraid.
But she came over and sat on his lap. Guild kept his word. He did not touch her. He just let her sit there on his knee the way he’d once held a daughter and sometimes a wife. That had been long, long ago. Sitting there in the darkness he thought again of the little girl he’d killed that time, and then he thought of the little girl who’d died of cholera. He thought of James Bruckner’s burned face, and he thought of the way the bullet had sounded, so sharp, the one from Kriker’s gun when Kriker’d put the Colt in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Then the wind came again and the window shook and he could feel the cold clean draft.
He sighed, and it was a very deep sigh, and she said, there in the darkness with her perfume and her sweet farm-girl face, “You all right, mister?”
And he sighed again and just stared out the window at the distant meaningless stars and said, “No, I don’t suppose I am.”
To that, she said nothing at all.
a cognizant original v5 release october 07 2010
Other Leisure books by Ed Gorman
Western:
GUILD
THE LONG RIDE BACK
GUN TRUTH
NIGHT OF SHADOWS
GRAVE’S RETREAT
LEGEND
TROUBLE MAN
Horror:
THE DARK FANTASTIC
THE POKER CLUB
SHADOW GAMES
Thriller:
THE MIDNIGHT ROOM
Copyright
A LEISURE BOOK®
November 2009
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
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Copyright © 1988 by Edward Gorman
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