by Nick Cutter
He tried to ignore it and focus on the task at hand. He had been hired for a ticklish bit of work by a man named Seaborn Appleton. He had made Appleton’s acquaintance following another bit of business he had done for his primary employer, who would remain nameless. Said business involved killing one Mortimer “Bladder” Knipple of Marfa, Texas, who had stabbed a man in a drunken fracas. The dead man happened to be kin to the Englishman’s employer. Restitutions needed to be made, and such debts could be paid only in blood.
The Englishman discovered Knipple brandy-drunk in a flophouse outside of Wimberley, where Knipple pulled the same dagger he’d used to kill the other man. The Englishman’s employer would have preferred Knipple be delivered alive—and if he had been, his sufferings would have been legendary—but as the Englishman had no inclination to tussle with a stabby drunk, he shot Knipple in the brain with a silenced pistol and took a Polaroid of the corpse.
When he telephoned his employer to say the job had been done, he was given Seaborn Appleton’s contact details with the assurance that any job would net a handsome payout. He called Appleton. Appleton spoke a name. It was a name the Englishman was acquainted with, in the way a territorial wrestler is familiar with the work of a man toiling in another region. The name sent the slightest twinge up the Englishman’s spine, which was a sensation he had not felt in years. He didn’t mind it at all. It told him he was alive.
It was that man the Englishman was presently making fast to murder. But again, there was the small matter of the car. It was shaking to pieces. There was a plastic hula dancer on the car’s dashboard; its hips swayed with every shake and judder. That dancer was crass, like so much of Americana. The Englishman occasionally missed the stolidity of his home country here in the land of neon and silver lamé and velvet Elvis paintings. That garishness sat against both the Englishman’s temperament and his adopted appearance—he favored well-cut suits and snappy hats, and wore his hair long and straight with the aid of a relaxing solution.
He ripped the dancer off the dash—the suction cup came free with a loud pok!—and tossed it out the window. His mind returned to the small matter of killing a man.
The Englishman was so preoccupied with the matters of the car, the man, and that man’s death that he took no notice of the person hopping antsily from foot to foot at the traffic light where he had stopped. The Englishman had needed to pull off the freeway into a sleepy burg in order to fill the tank. It was night by that point, the streets deserted save for this lone person—a man hopping about as if beset by the dire need to piss. So preoccupied was the Englishman that he didn’t even see the man snake up to the car. He took notice only when the man stuck his arm through the open window. At the end of that arm was a rusted pistol that looked to have been salvaged from a lake.
The man holding it had the skin of a decaying apple. His eyelids fluttered with some kind of sickness. Rusted or not, the gun looked powerful enough to tear the stranger’s stringy arm off if he elected to pull the trigger.
The Englishman reached to one side. The man waggled his gun in warning.
“You want money, I’m guessing?”
“That’s right,” said the man, breathing his mouth stench onto the Englishman. “You’s pretty smart, ain’t ya?”
“Bright as a penny, old chap.”
The man licked his lips, cracked and salt-whitened. “You talk stupid.”
The Englishman retrieved his wallet, fat with bills—he did not believe in banks, or of records of any sort—and handed it out the window. The man was so taken with the wallet’s plumpness that he did not see the Englishman reach for his own weapon, a silenced Colt 1903 that lay beneath a folded copy of the Hobbs Daily News-Sun on the passenger seat.
The Englishman shot the stringy fellow through the car door. There came a sharp report as a slug drove through one-sixteenth of an inch of Detroit rolling iron. A hole sprouted as if by magic in the man’s belly. He fell onto the street, shrieking and clawing at his stomach.
“Give me back my billfold,” the Englishman said calmly.
“You shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh—!”
“Shot you. Yes, I did. The wallet, man. Give it to me now, or I will put the next one in your wrinkly bollocks.”
The man’s face twisted in agonized incomprehension.
“Your balls, sir. Your oysters. Again, and for a final time, the wallet.”
The man managed to scrape it up and, groaning, blood pissing through the hole in his gut, handed it through the window. The Englishman glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nobody had witnessed the event, and tipped an imaginary cap to the man he’d shot.
“Heigh-ho.”
“I need a doctor!” the man wailed.
The Englishman said, “You’ll need an embalmer.”
The man sat on the street. Blood burped from the hole in his stomach. His mouth hung open in horror, spittle foaming on his lips.
“I suggest you crawl to the nearest clinic,” said the Englishman. “Or wait it out where you’re sitting. Either way, it oughtn’t take long.”
THREE HOURS LATER, the Englishman piloted the car up a hill that crested onto a plateau staggered with bur oaks. To the west lay the razor-backed peaks of the Mogollon Range. The San Francisco River valley spread out beneath him. The lights of Mogollon township glittered in the new dawn.
2
MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE had come to Mogollon to kill a man.
Seaborn Appleton was that man’s name. The Chemist, as he was otherwise known. Einstein with a chemistry set. Appleton created acid that could rip your scalp off and fill your brain with fanciful visions. Supercharged PCP that would keep you high a full day. Wild and wonderful stuff that had the dope fiends, speed freaks, and needle jockeys lining up down the block for a taste.
Appleton had acquired Micah for protection. Appleton did not maintain a home base. He preferred the life of the traveling snake oil salesman. Appleton went from town to town in a VW camper van, peddling his wares. It seemed a perverse way to live, but upon scrutiny it made sense. The supplies he required were often available only with a prescription, so they had to be procured from pharmacies and hospitals—at night, after hours, with the help of a lockpick set. Following these thefts, those places adopted better security measures. Then it was time to move on to another town.
Seaborn Appleton was also a suspicious sort. A paranoiac, you might even say. He’d adopted perpetual motion as a lifestyle—his enemies, of which he was convinced there were many, would find it harder to zero in on a moving target.
Part of Micah Shughrue’s job was to drive the VW camper from town to town while Appleton dozed fitfully on the foldout cot, occasionally screaming out as if in pain. Micah drove in silence at Appleton’s behest—no radio, only the musical tinkle of Appleton’s powders and liquids, all housed in glass bottles, rattling in the back.
Appleton preferred to sell directly to his clientele. Most drug lords—and Appleton was that, if one of minor regard—usually tasked low-level flunkies with the selling. Who wanted to deal with the scabby-faced, buttery-skinned addicts themselves? Who wanted to confront the physical manifestation of the poison they profited from? But Appleton got a kick out of it. He enjoyed the craven need in all those twitching, bloodshot eyes.
Appleton himself was a dour, funereal, and jarringly skeletal man. But put him in front of a gaggle of crankers, and his limbs loosened, his dourness receded, and his voice took on the rich, plaintive tones of a lay preacher.
“Ooooh, yes,” he’d say, displaying his newest wares. “You will be astonished, my pretties. This magical stuff will take you places you never dreamed existed.”
By the time Micah joined him, Appleton was beloved by the addicts of the towns he cycled through. They would catch wind of his arrival and do everything short of roll out a welcome mat. When it was time to move on, they practically clawed onto the bumper of his van, wailing at him to take them with him. For Micah, the work was easy. There were the expected scuffles. Jittery addicts
brandishing box cutters, demanding money or product. An upstart rival asserting claim over a territory that had been the Chemist’s for years—but Appleton had let it go with a shrug. “This country is too vast, and too full of paying customers, to go to war over one tiny patch of it,” he’d said. For eight months, Micah kept Appleton from bodily harm, and was compensated handsomely for his efforts.
Then Micah met a woman. They had been looping back down into Oregon at the time, plying their trade in familiar ports of call. The woman showed up at the abandoned soap factory where Appleton was entertaining clientele. She was carrying something.
Micah approached carefully, measuring her intentions, one hand on the butt of his pistol. Maybe she was carrying a gun—in his experience, sometimes the direst threat came in the most unlikely package. He roughly caught her arm.
“Show me,” he said.
The woman twisted painfully to reveal her sleeping infant daughter, partly swaddled in a grubby fleece blanket. The baby’s arms . . . well, that was the trouble. The little girl had no arms. Only a pair of melted nubs like amputation remnants jutting from her shoulders.
“She was born this way,” the woman said quietly. “And blind, too.”
“I am . . . sorry.” Micah didn’t know what else to say.
“It was the drugs that did it.” She looked wretched, cored out by grief. “I shouldn’t have taken them with her in my belly, but I was weak.”
The babe awoke and began to mewl. Its eyes were a featureless gray, as if molten pewter had been poured into the sockets.
“Would you shut that up?” Appleton called over. “It’s ruining my mood.”
After the last bug-eyed scrounger had left, Micah detailed this encounter to Appleton while they sat inside the van. Appleton’s response was in keeping with his nature.
“I sell drugs, man! Drugs hurt people. They hurt the trembling lives inside those people, too. They also make people feel wondrous and let them escape the horror of their inept, ridiculous existence for a while. I can’t be responsible. I won’t be!”
On the most basic level, Micah understood Appleton’s point. People were responsible for their own lives. But still, he couldn’t shake the sight of that tot.
“From what depths of soul do you dredge up this moral outrage, anyway?” Appleton said with a mocking laugh. “You’ve probably killed more men than my products ever will. Why else would I have hired you?”
“Not women, not children, not the unborn.”
Appleton shrugged. “It’s settled, then. We’re both killers.”
“Most every man I have ever killed was trying to do the same to me at the time.”
“That infant isn’t dead,” Appleton said petulantly. “She will simply have more challenges to face than other youngsters.”
Something snapped inside Micah right then. It happened from time to time, often without warning. He couldn’t help it and didn’t even try to—it came as a release of all that pent-up pressure.
Micah stepped outside the van. He grabbed a box of the Chemist’s newest, dandiest product and hurled it onto the cement of the soapworks. He set about stomping on it, grinding the bluish powder into the oily floor, reducing it to worthless paste.
“What are you—?” Appleton cried. “You cocksucking sonofawhoooore!”
Micah kept at it, laughing like a satyr. So intense was his rage that he did not notice Appleton reach under his cot for a small-bore pistol, which he quickly fired.
The slug hit Micah under the armpit, both his arms being raised in a gleeful jig. He was thrown down and the wind knocked out of him. He reached for his gun, but Appleton was already behind the wheel. He fired the van up and tore out of the soapworks, leaving Micah on the floor with the silvery tang of the crushed drug sharp in his nose.
He lay bleeding for several minutes. He thought: It is always the goddamn amateurs who score the luckiest hits. He stood and staggered five long blocks to a pay phone. He could not call a hospital. They would fix him up, but they would also send for the police. So he called a veterinarian, a man who owed Micah a favor. The vet arrived some time later to find Micah passed out in an alley not far from the phone booth.
The vet drove Micah to his office. He dug the bullet out and inserted a stent into Micah’s chest to vent the blood. For many days, Micah lay in the garden shed out behind the vet’s house with that stent jabbing out of him; he twisted a spigot to drain his own blood. He coughed up pints of blood, dark and thick as pancake batter, and descended into hallucinations.
Once he healed, he embarked upon a relentless pursuit of Seaborn Appleton, who was by then miles away in the company of new henchmen. Micah shot two of those new men in a cathouse in Elko, Nevada, but Appleton escaped with his third hired gun. After that, Micah caught wind that Appleton had put out a call for harder men—professional mercenaries, ex-military—and put a bounty on his former protector’s head.
Undeterred, Micah headed to Mogollon. He suspected it would be the bastard’s next stop, following his migratory pattern.
And when Appleton arrived, Micah Shughrue would kill him dead and that would be that.
3
MINERVA ATWATER had come to Mogollon to kill two men.
Her contract called for only one individual, a man named Micah Henry Shughrue. A veteran of the Korean War who had spent the ensuing years on the shadow side of the law. A gun for hire. A merc. Of late, he’d been loosely associated with a criminal enterprise operating out of Kansas City. He wasn’t a member of that particular outfit—more of a stringer. Five years ago, he’d been set upon by Deputy US Marshal Clint Smith, who rousted him in the bathtub of a Topeka whorehouse; Micah Shughrue shot Smith in the leg with a zip gun stashed under the towel folded neatly next to the tub and alighted on foot, running down the street and into the Topeka gorge naked as a jay. Evidently he’d survived. Shughrue seemed to be that, if nothing else. A survivor.
Micah Shughrue. By many accounts, the nastiest goddamn sonofabitch walking this earth. He was the first man she would kill.
The second man was a foreigner. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. An assassin. Remorseless, dead-eyed, black-skinned. Talked with a funny accent. Wore a fancy suit, fancy hat, grew his hair long like a woman. Carried pearl-handled pistols and, it was said, could knock the wings off a bumblebee’s back with either hand. His shadow was the last thing you saw before your brains fanned out the front of your skull.
He was the second man she would kill. Though in truth, the exact order was not so important.
Minerva had no contract for the Englishman. In point of fact, both Minerva and the Englishman had been hired by the same man: Seaborn Appleton. Both for the same task, killing Micah Henry Shughrue.
“The man has gone feral,” was how Appleton phrased it to her. “I knew of Shughrue’s past misdeeds, but he was valuable to me. Yet in time, he was once again given over to wickedness.”
Appleton had repelled Minerva at first glance. A jangly skeleton draped in cheap seersucker with a face like a dime’s worth of dog meat. She boggled at his success in the pharmacology trade; the only thing she’d ever buy from Appleton would be a sack, which she would slip over his head so as to spare herself the sight of his puckered bunghole of a mouth and his snake handler’s eyes. But a job was a job, and Appleton was paying cash on the barrelhead. As well he ought to, considering the man he was asking her to snuff.
“Why the two of us?” she asked.
“Insurance, my dear. If the Englishman fails, you will finish it. Or the other way round, as may happen.”
“I don’t need his damn help.”
“Oh yes, and he doesn’t need yours. But who can say? Mr. Shughrue is a very . . . ah, he is a man to whom completeness is key.”
“What in hell do you mean by that?”
“I mean he is a completist, my dear. He holds the most fastidious sense of it. A thing is only done once Micah Shughrue has rendered it so, and it is he alone who concludes when those ends have been met. He is a
finisher, in all. A more scrupulous sense of finality than any man I have ever met.”
The poached eggs of Appleton’s eyes quivered fearfully. Minerva found yet another reason to be revolted by him.
“He’s just a man,” she said. “A bullet will end him, same as anyone else.”
Appleton didn’t seem so sure. What did he think this Shughrue was, some deathless devil?
Appleton said, “How many men have you killed?”
“Enough,” said Minerva.
“Don’t lie to me. How many?”
Minerva cut her gaze at Appleton—her pale eyes were ringed with gold, but were not yet those of a killer. She had hurt men, quite badly in fact, but . . . it was not that she was chicken-gutted. It was simply that the opportunity had not presented itself. She was a bounty hunter. The men she’d pursued to that point were meek creatures: debt shirkers, those on the scamper from their creditors. One of them had come at Minerva with a knife; she’d busted his knee with a length of stovewood. She’d peppered another one’s buttocks with wolf shot when he tried to flee. And she’d crippled a bookie named Thelonious Skell for nonbusiness reasons.
But kill a man? End his life? No, not yet. But she was good and ready.
“I’ve killed three men,” she lied.
“And did they die quickly?”
“Slower than they would have liked.”
“You’ll want to finish Shughrue fast,” said Appleton. “As quick as you can pull the trigger. ’Cause he won’t stop until he’s killed you. And depending on his mood, which is poor at the best of times, he might move on to your mother, your father, and your children.”
“Do I look like a mother to you?” she said.
After wrapping affairs with Appleton, Minerva retired to her fleabag motel. It was a day’s drive to Mogollon. Appleton intended to delay his arrival there to ensure that Shughrue—whom Appleton could feel breathing down his neck—would show up the day before. Minerva and the Englishman would also come that same day. All things being proper, Micah Shughrue would be dead by the time Appleton’s VW van crossed the town line.
