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1. Lookback (Next Town Over the Novel chapter 1)
🕑 Added 2021-12-03 16:44:04 +0000 UTCIt was early evening when the big gray stallion crested the last ridge before Lookback, a small but clean cowtown at the floor of a gentle, wide open valley: the easternmost fringe of the western wilds. This was the first place free ranging cattle had been in evidence, wandering and foraging the rolling, grassy drumlins amongst spare, scattered cedars and their long purple shadows.
Lookback itself was a low-built, vaguely T-shaped collection of pine buildings, bordering on rustic. Nary a brick in sight.
The stallion’s rider was mostly hidden under a fibrous gray cloak that might have been wool, but, then again, might have been something else. Even under its voluminous folds it was a good bet the frame beneath belonged to a woman, and a small, girlishly built woman at that. It took a look under her wide-brimmed black hat, at her sharp features and hot, unusual orange eyes gleaming from dark, tired sockets to verify that she was grown; not just grown, but tapped-out looking and pale as death. Possibly she was pretty, after a fashion, but it was difficult to say: she was strange, and had taken no clear care of herself in some time. She had the kind of red hair folks are wont to liken to flames and sunset and autumn, but it was short-cropped and dirty, clinging together in knifish clumps.
The gray stallion, whose name was Diamonds (probably so-named for the white star on his forehead and the matching snip on his right nostril) stopped at the crest, intuiting his rider’s want to reconnoiter Lookback from this perfect vantage point. He knew who he was carrying, and he knew who she was after—who they were both after.
From his back she surveyed the town’s two loosely-suggested intersecting streets and found what was undoubtedly a hotel, very probably a saloon besides, built on one of the T’s inside corners. It was the biggest structure down there, with two smoking fieldstone chimneys and signage out front extending upward well beyond the reach of its two storeys. Undoubtedly that’s where he’d be.
A slight shift in her mean weight signaled Diamonds to move on.
Veronique Dauterive would have looked perfectly inconspicuous at the opera house in Red Fork, or in the dining room of a steamboat on the big river, or even greeting guests at a brothel; such was her extravagant, immodest red getup, all crunching red taffeta and scarlet lace sprinkled with garnet beadwork and punctuated by a pendant featuring an obscenely large red stone. It was of a perfect length to nestle indiscreetly between her corset-bolstered breasts, drawing the eye unfailingly to all three. She was flanked by two enormous bodyguards, Lash Boudreax and Renfro Ricard: cousins of hers but you wouldn’t have known to look at them. Veronique was blonde and green-eyed and tan as she was (conspicuously, new-money tan like she’d been picking cotton up until last week) she was still clearly from fair stock, whereas the men watching over her were each black as iron and solidly built as locomotives besides. They were also far more intent on their overall surroundings than Veronique herself, hawkish eyes suspiciously looking for weapons or too-hostile squints. She, meanwhile, had eyes only for the cowboy across from her, who reeked of sweat and of horses but had just spread an impressive full house across the table: aces full of fives.
Veronique’s painted parted in a bowlike little O of apparent shock. There were a few sharp intakes of breath and a couple triumphant chuckles from around the table, one belonging to the cowboy himself. Finally! someone had beaten this painted little stranger with her look clothes and her but-don’t-touch entourage.
Veronique’s huge-eyed gape lasted about two seconds, and then she flipped and fanned her own cards, hiding her mouth and revealing a straight flush. Hearts. Of course. When she again revealed her mouth it was drawn into a grin of mischief.
“Seems I got lucky again, boys!”
The cowboy’s fist hit the table with enough force to seemingly fling him up out of his chair: he was fully standing when the thump hushed the attendant crowd. For a heartbeat he looked to be contemplating violence, at which point he met the flat gaze of Veronique’s leftmost cousin—Lash—and, polling Renfro, glaring on her right, reconsidered.
The cowboy left. Shortly thereafter most of the men who’d been buzzing around the little card table did likewise. It was impossible to get anywhere with Veronique in any sense of the expression and the endeavor itself had exhausted its entertainment value.
“Oh, where you off to, fellas?” Veronique laughed, raking coins and crumpled bills to her bosom in a histrionic show of sheer, avaricious victory. “Play another hand! I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it eventu -”
She broke off as a hand, gloved in soft black kid, closed over the wooden seatback of the abandoned chair opposite her. Her eyes scaled a wall of impeccable white suit.
* * *
Diamonds’ rider had a rifle that had once been a pretty straightforward lever action with a tubular magazine and a cattle brandish monogram scratched into its buttplate—the same glyph-like brand Diamonds wore on his rear right hindquarter. The woman had retrofitted the rifle, though: eviscerated its nickel receiver and stuffed it full of slick brass clockwork to automate its action with the clever precision of a watchmaker, an alteration she’d followed up by gouging away the monogram with the scribbling abandon of a furious child. The latter was the only modification visible with the gun stowed in the holster slung under her right stirrup; still, even a straightforward-looking rifle with some scratched-out engraving probably fell within the scope of the sign Diamonds passed as he carried her into Lookback:
THE CARRYING AND DISCHARGING OF FIREARMS
IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED WITHIN CITY LIMITS
The woman didn’t so much as glance sidelong at the sign, unconcerned despite the rifle, two unusual pistols with the same kind of tubular magazines and modified action holstered at her hips, and some assortment of cans or canisters clipped to a concealed shoulder rig—you could hear them clank and jingle with Diamonds’ every step despite their concealment underneath that itchy gray heap of a cloak.
There weren’t too many folk wandering Lookback’s thoroughfare to question her flouting of their local ordinances, though: an aproned shopkeep she passed was preoccupied dogging the last malingering clouds of dust from his tract of boardwalk with a broom; a bespectacled financier-type fumbled impotently with a misbehaving lock beyond his apparent expertise on the front door of a land office. For all the notice they took of her, she took even less of them, her dead-eyed gaze fixed on the saloon up the street (for it was indeed a saloon; from here she could hear the plink of a cheap piano). She thought she could make out a familiar, blaze red bay tethered out front.
“Veronique Dauterive.” It really wasn’t a question, either: it was the declaration of someone surprised to find an acquaintance somewhere unforeseen. Except the man standing across from her wasn’t surprised. His hat had been politely banished to his opposite hand, and he didn’t look about to sit down uninvited, but he wasn’t surprised: the corners of his grin were curled too slyly. “You ought to exercise a little more caution rilin’ up these cowboys, Ma’am—ignorant cowpokes can be dangerous cruel.”
“Have we met?” Veronique’s tone was civil, even chipper, but her arms were still thrown around her takings, somewhat defensively, a scrappy runt ready to fight off the big dogs. “You do look familiar, sir.”
“No, Ma’am. I don’t believe we have.” His pale blue eyes had the look of someone laughing inwardly at a private joke, guarding his amusement because an explanation would be tedious or impolite.
He took his hand off the back of the chair, unfurled it in a showy indication of the seat. “May I?”
Veronique smiled, the flirtatious little bow from earlier. She looked comically predatory: a brassy runt to her core. She relaxed her defense of her hoard to reach into a beaded red clutchpurse lying beside her on the table and fish out a cigarette holder, gorgeously drawn red glass. Behind her, Renfro attentively produced some tobacco and set to rolling a quirley for each of the three cousins. “So long as you aim to play.”
The man didn’t act immediately on her invitation. “I aim to play ‘s long as the stakes’re agreeable.” His eyes flicked down toward her bosom and that huge red rock. These weren’t ocean- or sapphire-blue eyes or any of that lyrical horseshit: they were the stark, blown-out blue of a cloudless, killing hot summer noon. “I ain’t interested in money.” With this vague stipulation he sat his hat on the table and folded his big frame into the little saloon chair.
“Oh?” said Veronique, clearly and coyly intrigued. She had the cigarette holder gripped in her bared teeth, fitted with Renfro’s proffered cigarette. She was still struggling with striking a match from her bag when the man in the white suit leaned across the table and lit the cigarette for her, seemingly with his fingertips. She didn’t have long to wonder at this, though, because while he had his arm extended toward her he went on to take the liberty of reaching for her pendant. The backs of his long, gloved fingers couldn’t help but brush her naked chest as he boldly scooped up the stone to examine. Lash and Renfro uncoiled from behind Veronique, looming like thunderclouds.
Neither Veronique nor the man in the white suit reacted: the man’s eyes shifted from the stone to meet hers but ignored her cousins. “This little trinket was your Aunt Boudreaux’s, wasn’t it? Like most of the money you lost along your way out here.”
Veronique stared back, unflinching, similarly unconcerned with her ominously crowding cousins or the heat of the man’s hand, still resting there, scandalously, thin soft leather all that separated them. “You certainly make up in nerve what you lack in manners. What’s your name, stranger? You have me at a disadvantage and I’m dangerous cornered.”
Diamonds longingly swung his head toward a nearby water trough out in front of Lookback’s little freight office. The woman let him meander off to drink, redirecting her to the signboard near the freight office door. It was covered in a flaking hide of layered paper corners, the remnants of a hundred notices and wanted postings carefully tacked up and hastily torn down. Pinned among an outermost stratum of fresher wanted sheets was one that hadn’t been forced to make due with a spare line drawing of the individual in question like the rest; this one featured a reprint of a genuine, professionally-made photograph. She knew it well; she knew the face grinning smartly at the camera from beneath the brim of a black tophat even better.
WANTED:
JOHN HENRY HUNTER
Arson, Destruction of Property, Murder, Suspicion of Witchcraft
$10,000
will be paid by this department for the apprehension or termination of this man.
Hunter stands Six Foot 4 inches high ; Approx 220 pounds.
Blue eyes ; brown hair, graying. Approx. 40 years of age.
Wears a neat-cropped beard ; clothing of fine quality.
Immediate use of deadly force recommended even if the suspect appears unarmed.
***
He looked like the gent in the photo, sure enough, but older, smile chiseled sharper with age. The description accounted for the extra years, though: dark hair, graying. Silver streaked his temples and the vertices of a short-boxed beard. Tip to toe, this was unmistakably ten grand murderer John Henry Hunter, though Lash and Renfro had decided independently that “Six Foot 4 inches high ; Approx 220 pounds” should probably have read “built like a steel-driver”; Hunter’s clothing of fine quality — a white felt gambler’s hat and a matching frock coat over a brassy satin vest—would have looked absurd on him had they not been so unimpeachably tailored.
Veronique had never been much for paying attention to her surroundings and had apparently managed to avoid seeing any of Hunter’s ubiquitous wanted posters. She certainly wasn’t reacting with the concern Lash and Renfro would have liked.
Lash decided he would be remiss in not making her aware of the obvious, and leaned close to breathe a warning in her ear.
Her response was not one of redoubled caution as her cousin had allowed himself to hope.
“Oh?” she said. It was a gulp of a noise, like an overexcited lapdog snapping up a dropped tidbit, and she didn’t ease off staring at Hunter. She was leering at him, really, with clear, hungry intrigue. “Tell me. How is it, then, that the territories’ most villainous outlaw has made the apparent acquaintance of my murdered aunt?”
Hunter—for of course he was John Henry Hunter—let the pendant settle cozily back in to its slightly indecent resting place and retracted his hand. He relaxed back into his chair, smile returning, spreading jaggedly across his face. “Peculiar business, what happened with your Aunt Boudreaux.” He glanced down at the bottle of bourbon beside Veronique’s purse, requisitioning a drink with an authoritative twitch of his eyebrows. To Lash and Renfro’s silent outrage she responded instantly and wordlessly, pouring him a shot—in her own glass!—and sliding it over. “Peculiar and unfortunate,” Hunter drawled on, speculatively, taking the drink. “But I do hope you’re not insinuatin’ somethin’, ma’am.”
“Au contraire, sir.” Veronique said. She savored a long drag off her cigarette; made a show of it, really, most certainly aping something she’d seen Red Fork sophisticates do. Smoke curled from her parted, painted lips. “Just curious. But of course my aunt always did keep peculiar company. Peculiar and unfortunate.”
One man did take an interest in Diamonds and his rider’s jangling arsenal as the horse ambled along the thoroughfare.
Leaning in the shadows of the boardwalk, silently and pensively gnawing a mouthful of tobacco, Lookback’s sheriff figured her for a bounty hunter the instant she rode into view. After all, $10,000 John Henry Hunter was lounging in the saloon.
Oh, sure he knew the outlaw was here, but unlike this driven little hardcase Hunter had been possessed of the decency to conceal any weaponry he might have been carrying. And the sheriff could read — deadly force recommended even if the suspect appears unarmed. A shot at the ten grand wasn’t worth a shot at a pine box so long as Hunter didn’t stir up any trouble in Lookback. The rest of that stuff he’d allegedly done before he’d ridden into town? Someone else’s problem.
He’d have taken this apparent bounty hunter for a dilettante, if not for all that hardware and the way she was sitting that big gray horse, deep and relaxed in the way only the truly unafraid can. She was gonna stir up the trouble, God damn it, forcing his involvement.
Bounty hunter shitheels.
The sheriff spat, hand slipping to the grip of his revolver, just to make sure it was handy.
“But to the business at hand….” Veronique segued, sliding her deck of fancily-printed playing cards into the open center of the table.
Hunter finished his bourbon in an appreciative gulp. “Yes, Ma’am.” He slipped the cards out from under her gloved hand before she could commence shuffling herself. “If you can call such a pleasure business.”
Veronique was a fair hand at shuffling cards, and had aimed to impress, but she found herself quickly glad of his preemptive strike: the outlaw shuffled with a magician’s legerdemain. It was entertainment just watching the deck twist and sigh between those deft fingers, but more importantly she’d have embarrassed herself had she dealt—embarrassed herself and never known. The very thought reddened her cheeks, but you could hardly tell under all the rouge. “What didyou have in mind for stakes, sir, if not money?”
His summer eyes strayed unashamedly back to her bosom—or was it the pendant, again? They were narrowed with raw avarice, either way, and Veronique, fascinated with this infamous rogue who may or may not have liberated her from her penniless exile to the southern swamps along with her eccentric aunt’s money, hoped the former. She wasn’t about to let him know that, though, and raised a hand demurely to her throat, putting her deepening blush to work on a look of scandalized innocence.
Hunter grinned. “Your aunt was a good friend of mine, Miss Dauterive. I’d very much like a little somethin’ to remember her by.”
Veronique’s fingers slid down her neck to close around the ember red stone. “My pendant?” she said, sulkily. “And what do you aim to wager against it, sir?”
“Well now, to keep money out of this altogether and thereby keep things interestin’, how about if you win…” Hunter leaned forward on his elbows, setting the reshuffled cards aside in a neat stack, evergreen grin uncomfortably knowing. “…I’ll satisfy your curiosity and accompany you upstairs.”
The briefest stillness crawled by as Veronique and her cousins sopped up Hunter’s audacity, her blush bleeding out to her eartips, and then, even as Lash and Renfro manifested knives in their hands via their own brand of legerdemain, it was Dauterive who moved first.
“How dare you!” she barked, with animal hurt. She’d stood up so fast her skirts half overturned the table, and she’d swung with the flat of her hand for Hunter’s insolent grin, but he’d grabbed her wrist, stopping her. Her breath caught in her throat like a fishbone. He stared back at her evenly,pointedly oblivious to her cousins’ encroaching knives and self-satisfied with his own accuracy.
Arson, Destruction of Property, Murder, Suspicion of Witchcraft. Peculiar and unfortunate. Better late than never, fear began to close around Veronique’s throat, tight and implacable as an iron band—as Hunter’s long, graceful fingers, still sunk into the red satin of her gloves.
“Oh, c’mon, darlin’,” Hunter drawled conversationally. He let go of her wrist to rescue the bourbon from the floor where it had fallen when Veronique had upset the table. Free of his grip she was nevertheless still held there, standing stupidly, by his bleached-blue eyes. “Is the maint’nance o’ your faux virtue whilst you gamble away a dead woman’s earnin’s in a low down drinking establishment stric’ly necessary?” Sitting up with his recovered bourbon he found Lash and Renfro’s knives in noticeably closer proximity. “I understand this is the frontier, Mizz Dauterive, and I appreciate it’d make a better story if the dangerous rogue with the dash and the dab dealin’ hand won your honor at cards but it just don’t hardly seem fair, does it…?” He raised the bourbon as if in salute, meaning to take a swig straight from the bottle, and then he actually winked. “Bettin’ somethin’ you’re lookin’ to give away, anyhow?”
“Tuat t'en grosse bueche, couillon,” Lash rasped,closing the rest of the distance around the table to press his knife to Hunter’s neck like he had a mind to give him a good shave.
Renfro joined him a little more leisurely, furiously clucking his tongue and touching the tip of Hunter’s nose with his own knife. “Wherever did a dandy like you learn to talk that way to a lady?”
Lash managed to press his knife even closer for emphasis — cradling Hunter’s adam’s apple with the blade, really. “Any lady, let alone our petit cousine.”
“Well now.” Hunter didn’t just appear unintimidated: he put on a look of deliberate, schoolteacherpatience. “Seems the two of you weren’t anymore careful readin’ that wanted poster than your petit cousine here, after all.” The outlaw tossed back a mouthful of bourbon, but he didn’t swallow. He regurgitated the liquor full in Lash’s face, on fire.
Startled, Renfro hesitated, and Hunter rounded on him like a dragon, drenching him in flames.
It was most certainly Hunter’s bay, Hearts. Diamonds whickered a quiet, reflexive greeting before the brand—the same sharp, sigilish brand—resolved itself on the red horse’s right hindquarter. Smoke and screaming burst from the saloon’s batwing doors as the woman rode up, a final confirmation as she jerked the rifle free of its holster.
The sheriff appeared down the street, jogging over with his gun in hand, resignedly yelling a cease and desist, but the woman wouldn’t have heard him as she slid from Diamonds’ saddle even if not for the racket, so intent was she on scanning and dismissing each of the handful of cowboys who fled the saloon in a hailstorm of discombobulated obscenity.
Inside, the saloon had pretty well cleared out apart from the trio of cousins and was being rapidly bedecked in curtains of fire as Lash and Renfro thrashed and howled. Capsized drinks dropped by fleeing patrons had drenched the place in liquor and floorboards and furniture caught like kindling. The howling began to drown and taper off off as fire seared the lungs and throats of Veronique’s dying cousins.
She herself was unharmed, physically, backing unsteadily away from Hunter and, by extension, the safety of the exit. Transfixed by his sinister calm as he collected his hat and stuffed it on his head, she dared not break past, and eventually found her bustle crumpled against the chair rail with nowhere further to retreat.
Smiling patiently all the while, Hunter followed, closing to such an intimate distance Veronique could feel his breath on her vulnerable neck and in the surreality of the moment thought he meant to kiss her rather than wondering how she could possibly notice the heat of his exhalation in the furnace the saloon had become.
“Get out. Get out or I’ll shoot, so help me you son of a bitch.”
Hunter looked up—Veronique didn’t; she was still staring at him and shoving herself ever tighter against the wall behind her. It was the voice of the manager, standing above in the second floor hallway with a double-barreled shotgun resting on the railing, pivoted down at Hunter.
Hunter’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly as he looked back at Veronique, almost conspiratorially. He clucked his tongue, as if he was looking for her agreement. He raised his voice, then, to address the innkeeper, but his eyes didn’t leave Veronique’s and his hand strayed again to her pendant.“Friendly game o’ cards ends in knifeplay before the stakes’re even agreed upon and here I’m unarmed since supposedly this pisshole has a no firearms ordinance and now would you look here? Proprietor himself’s waiting for me not with the sheets turned down but with both barrels of a big ol’ eight gauge. This is a real hard place for a law-abidin’citizen, seems like.”
Hunter took the stone in his fingers and pulled; the chain and filigree and lesser stones that had made up its setting scattered as it broke. A garnet bead settled into the valley of her breasts and Hunter fastidiously plucked it out and flicked it aside as he pocketed the big red stone itself. “Not exactly what you bargained for, I’d wager,” he told Veronique. “But you wanted excitement, didn’t you, Mizz Dauterive? Seems to me the frontier’s made good so far.”
Per the dictates of etiquette he tipped his hat and began reflexively to back away to avoid turning his back on her, but a few steps later Lash’s unrecognizably burnt husk finally fell directly in his path and Hunter turned, then, to better negotiate stepping over the twisting figure.
With a parting glance up at the glowering eight-gauge he made a show of slamming a half dollar on a burning table to cover the cost of the bourbon, and then pushed his way out the saloon doors.
He might have looked over his shoulder when Veronique finally gathered herself well enough to start screaming, but his attention was caught breathlessly the moment he stepped outside.
The red-haired woman stood there, clockwork rifle leveled up at him from the bottom of the saloon’s short three steps, and then the screaming, and the saloon, and the sheriff running up the street and the gawkers and all of Lookback were gone,
and it was just her, outside the theatre, looking up at him with badly-hidden surprise at having been hailed, embedded deep in the crush of exiting patrons and yet all he saw, alone. Her hair was brushed copper, then, and her eyes weren’t orange but blue, blue as a swimming hole on a killing hot summer day, and he knew that embarrassed half smile—
But that wasn’t who he was looking at now: staring down the rifle barrel was a look of mechanical malice: hateful orange eyes firebox coals in a face as otherwise impassive as iron.
Diamonds whickered at him, or possibly at the sheriff, who’d dug his heels into a dusty halt a scant five yards away with the barrel of his pistol floating indecisively between the outlaw and the woman. “Goddamn you I said stop!”
They ignored him, though. The millisecond that had widened Hunter’s eyes in a flash of surprised recognition was gone and he was tipping his hat, cruelly oblivious smile returned, and the woman’s finger was coiling around the rifle trigger like a constrictor.
“John Henry Hunter,” she said, in a voice dry and oddly hollow, like an empty boiler tank, and fired.
The report from the rifle was overloud, its amplitude bolstered by a simultaneous crack from the sheriff’s gun. His bullet thudded into the woman’s left forearm, which had been steadying the long rifle barrel in front of her, disturbing her aim enough that her own shot grazed the graying fringe of Hunter’s close-cropped beard and then buried itself harmlessly in the saloon’s clapboards.
“I’m just about sick to death of you bounty hunter shitheels thinking you’re above regard for the law!” the sheriff hollered, voice cracking with intensity in his desperation to be heeded.
With the sound of a key turning crisply in a new lock the woman’s rifle ejected a brass casing and chambered another bullet as she squared her aim. There was a conspicuous lack of blood involved, though, and she seemed hardly to notice the wound as she tracked Hunter’s casual descent from the saloon door. He appeared to share her concern with the sheriff—which is to say he had none—reaching into his jacket for a cigar as he made casually for his bay. His eyes stayed fastened to the woman, the slight, guarded smile hardened on his mouth.
The sheriff decided to switch tactics, jerking his pistol over at Hunter, instead. “And just where you think you’re going, Hunter?”
Hunter’s eyes dwindled to amused little slits as he rooted the cigar in his teeth. With a twist of his fingers he lit it as he had Dauterive’s cigarette; meanwhile he reached out toward the sheriff with the outspread fingers of his opposite hand. Spontaneously, the cartridges in the firearm pointed at him discharged, all at once, peeling the top strap off the gun and ripping apart the cylinder along with most of the lawman’s hand. Keening curses, the sheriff dropped what little remained of the pistol.
Veronique emerged from the smoke of the saloon just as Hunter was swinging aboard his bay. She was arm-in-arm with the owner and both were coughing and retching through handkerchiefs.
“Fire, sheriff!” choked the innkeeper, too smoke-blind and consumed with worry over his establishment to notice the lawman was letting out a continuous snarl of pain as he beheld his flayed, shrapnel-riddled hand.
The red-haired woman took a shot at Hunter as he spun the bay and thundered off with his heels in the horse’s flanks. Missing, she threw open her serape and dove beneath its rough gray folds with a free hand, affording anyone who might’ve been looking a glimpse at a veritable garland of brass canisters: ammunition for a peculiar weapon she now retrieved: a mad, short-barreled grenade launcher. Unceremoniously dropping the rifle she ripped free one of the brass charges and fitted it to the gun, managing to load and level it at Hunter just as he hurtled out of town. She pulled the trigger.
Hunter glanced under his arm to see the projectile arcing neatly toward him. He threw his free hand out behind him; from it he flung a fireball backward to intercept the canister, detonating it midair and consuming half a building and the roughly-scratched “Welcome to Lookback” sign that had graced this approach.
With a hiss like the last water scorching off the bottom of a kettle, the woman stowed the grenade launcher and made for Diamonds, her last stride a leap that put her leading foot in the near stirrup. The grey stallion had flattened into a gallop before her other leg had so much as settled over his back.
Recognizing a closing window of opportunity for some recompense, the sheriff, clutching his burnt and bleeding right hand in his left armpit, clumsily drew and cocked his left pistol.
“Goddamnit,” he said, firing.
The bullet caught up to Diamonds at the edge of town, as he danced through the debris of the sign and the house. It grazed his hindquarters, and the horse chuffed in apparent irritation without slowing or deviating from his pursuit of Hearts.
Vane glanced back at the red brushstroke the bullet had painted across the horse’s driving muscle, even as she leveled the barrel of the rifle across her left forearm to fire after Hunter. And then she spoke:
“ ‘Diamonds,’ I thought, for your looks, and to fit with the rest of his…collection. But you’re tougher than steel, sure enough.”
Diamonds’ eyes rolled in his head at the sound of her voice, more startling than the bullet grazing his flesh. Bleeding, he barreled up the valley grade after Hunter and Hearts, Lookback a dwindling column of smoke and dust behind him.
Ahead, Hearts surged on with champion speed, but Diamonds was devouring the gap. With another glance behind him, Hunter took the cigar from his teeth and chucked it backwards. The butt landed in Diamonds’ path, a scant few lengths ahead of him, The grey ignored the little thing, until, ahead, Hunter thrust his right arm into the air, and the cigar’s pinprick flame exploded skyward in response, an instant, towering flame twisting fifty feet up into the twilight.
Most horses would have erupted into a panic, potentially lost their feet in their desperation to get away from the unnatural blaze. Diamonds cut around it like a barrel racer, unhurt and unaffected but for the fire singing the tips of his swinging mane. He snorted at the scent of burnt hair, and continued to gain on Hearts and Hunter.
Ahead, a bare cottonwood spread dead and lonely at the top of the rise. Flattening against Hearts’ neck Hunter avoided a shot at his head from Vane’s rifle. He freed his lariat from his saddle strings and lengthened its noose enough to throw, turning Hearts with his knees in an attempt to evade another shot, which he did, but a third caught the bay right in the neck as his body broadened in the woman’s sights. In the instant before the horse folded Hunter threw his rope, desperate but level, at an overhanging branch of the oncoming cottonwood. As the lariat wrapped once, neatly, around the tree branch Hunter tumbled free of the somersaulting bay. Hearts crumpled, thrashing. Blossoms of flung gore freckled the yellow prairie grass red and settling dust turned it blightish black almost as fast as Diamonds pounded past. The grey horse narrowly skirted the dead but inertia drove he and his rider past Hunter and under the overhang of the cottonwood, where the perfectly looped lariat settled around the red-haired woman’s neck.
With the lariat looped around the branch Hunter hardly felt the tug of such a mean frame getting jerked from the back of her horse by the impromptu gallows. Not in his hands, anyways: the pull in his gut was sorely palpable as she swung, limp and grotesque, hat knocked from her snarl of red hair. Hunter’s mouth went tight as the noose.
He moved slowly to the trunk of tree to tie off the standing end of the rope, and as he yanked closed the knot the remaining coil burned loose for future use. He slipped it over his arm.
Diamonds had returned, but cautiously, angrily, circling the tree at a nervous trot with his ears flat and his tail high. He looked primed for a fight, and he was strategically avoiding closing to a distance where he expected Hunter could catch him with the remnants of his lariat. Prairie fire was racing toward them across the dry grass, appearing to preternaturally skirt the hilltop and the tree, but the heat was immense nonetheless and Diamonds was driven into a closer orbit. He whickered, low and threatening as thunder.
For now though Hunter was unconcerned with the grey stud apart from a glance of acknowledgement. He fished in his jacket for another cigar and finally approached the red haired woman’s dangling form. The rope creaked, barely audible over the roar and crackle. Her little body swayed in the whorl of thermals from the surrounding blaze. Hunter ducked slightly to look up into her face under the fringe of her long front bangs and as he did so, her pistols were in her hands. She hadn’t managed to get the guns between them though before Hunter backstepped, extending a hand, and the chambered cartridges blew, but the red haired woman was already dropping them. She’d noted what happened to the sheriff’s gun and hand.
Diamonds whistled now, a warning sound like a locomotive, and lunged closer, lower lip gaping open to bare his teeth. Hunter just chuckled at him. “Easy there, Bucko. Remember whose brand you’re wearin’.”
Hunter returned to the woman, moved close. Her head was raised now, the ruse gone. Hung as she was by his gallows they were at eye level, close enough to kiss. Hunter was squinting into her eyes and she unflinchingly returned his stare. Hers was hate, hot as the prairie fire. He absently raised his hand and brushed her grimy cheek with a forefinger and as even as he did he was glad he was wearing gloves because he may have otherwise recoiled. He took a contemplative drag of his cigar and dropped his arm.
“Maybe next time, huh, Angel Eyes?” he said. It was a taunt, obviously, and yet it ached, also, with regret.
His arm shot out behind him to seize Diamonds’ dangling reins, and he’d turned and swung aboard before the horse could properly object.
“I shouldn’t be shocked you’d go and shoot poor ol’ Hearts but here we are.” He exhaled sharply, smoke and sigh. “So I suppose I’ll be takin’ Diamonds then.”
Diamonds crow-hopped, nervous and indignant, to one side, but then couldn’t help himself relaxing: the seat was so familiar. In this queer context the big grey stud was soothed by this barest breath of familiarity despite himself. Hunter patted his neck.
“He was too much horse for you, anyhow,” he said, managing a cruel grin. He touched the brim of his hat. “So long, darlin’.”
Diamonds spun at a brush of the reins on his neck and trotted bravely toward the fire, which parted for him in a blackened avenue as Hunter rode away from the tree.
The red-haired woman watched him go and remembered the last time she’d seen his broad back retreating through the flames.
So few had gathered, shockingly few, all things considered, around the big timber pyre. The crowded little church graveyard was just a little ways off, and they of all people should have been able to afford a well-appointed plot there, so that too was shocking: this simplish pine box about to be burnt up like autumn leaves was a weirdly modest end to the individual inside. Then again, if you’d known the inhabitant and the circumstances you also knew the creeping paranoia that kept people away, that led them to burn this corpse rather than lay it to rest as they might have liked.
Genuine, deferent sorrow was certainly in no short supply: people had carpeted the bark slopes of the pyre with wildflower bouquets gathered in tribute. The thing was a mound of blossoms, snow-capped with an extravagant spray of white roses draped over the coffin lid. And yet people were whispering: gloved hands masked scandalized, censorious comments hissed to neighbors even as the balding, partridge-shaped preacher approached the coffin. He had a prayer book in one hand, sopped the sweat from his brow with the other before tucking away his handkerchief and reaching sort of timidly for the torch being offered in his general direction by a man with his chin on his chest, snuffling into his doffed cap.
For all his age and experience the preacher had never set fire to a corpse before. He was anxious about it: he’d heard stories of uneven heat tightening muscle and sinew and fleshly mechanick and causing the dead to twist or thrash or sit bolt upright and kick open their casket. He dwelled on this and hoped that rose-frosted casket was nailed shut but good even as he eulogized.
Finally, the preacher reached out to set fire to the timber, fumbling with his prayer-book hand to keep his sleeve well away from the flames. He stepped back as the pyre caught, yellow flame twining up through clumps of daisies and phlox toward the nicely-fitted pine box. Eventually the fire got its teeth into that, too, and then mourners’ renewed wails were cut short by the thunder-crack sound of the coffin very literally exploding. The box burst open on a wave of fire, as if they’d gathered to lay to rest a few hundred pounds of black powder, and a blink later the bursting pine was fully consumed by the heat like cheap paper even as ash and red hot finishing nails were flung into the crowd.
The preacher fainted, crumpling in a limp black heap among blossoming flame.
At the epicenter of the fire, amongst the flinders and char that had been a neatly stacked pyre just seconds previously, rose a figure, screaming, loud enough to clear the fire’s tidal wave roar. Robed wholly in flames, the figure saw the broad back of an expensive black overcoat hurrying, head down, away from the scene.
