LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in the wind, covering one eye with his left hand to keep from seeing double.

      “Looks like your money’s as good as gone,” Sal whispered.

      Finally, Jack got fed up. His right shoulder popped forward in its socket as his wiry arm collected the pistol in one swift motion. Buddy must’ve woke from his stupor at that particular moment, because he had the good sense to draw as well. And he was surprisingly fast.

      They say steady is more important than fast, because then you only have to shoot once. But when you’re steady and fast, there’s no wasted motion and everything else seems to stand still. Jack’s gun slid out of its holster, and the shine of the metal brightened. He cleared leather with a whip of his wrist and leveled the barrel. Jack always looked as though he moved in slow motion because he was so calm, even though he was really moving quicker than runaway mustangs.

      This time though, Jack looked even slower on account of how quick Buddy really was moving. Drunk as he was, Buddy cleared leather and squeezed off three shots before Jack could pull the trigger once. One bullet hit the ground between them, another ricocheted off a rock into a horse. The third caught Jack Finney in the face, just below his left eye. A drape of blood spread across his smooth cheeks. There was a loud braying in the distance, then the horse and Jack both dropped at once.

      The crowd was stunned to silence. Then the vampire laughed from his balcony above.

      “Shit!” Sal cussed. “Guess you gotta be fast when you drink too much to aim properly.”

      The Chinaman came and lugged away both bodies. Jack was hardly a speck of man, all bone and muscle, and the Chinaman hauled him off by the ankles. Then he hitched the pony carcass to the back of a two-horse carriage and hauled it to the pigpen. Its heft, along with Jack’s bit of sinewy muscle, would later be appreciated as thick white stripes in the bacon. That evening, Buddy moved into Jack’s room in the hotel, just below the vampire, and Damnation had a new top gunman. The paper was a little longer than usual that week, but I suppose it was good practice so my hand wouldn’t cramp up later on when the bodies really started piling up.

      The Crapper

      Comings: Buddy Baker, originally of Louisville, Kentucky, was orphaned at the age of eight by a fire that took his mother, father, and baby sister. In order to keep himself alive, he took to thievery. At the age of ten, he murdered a man who tried to deprive him of his take in a pick-pocketing, which he makes no apologies for. From then, the list of crimes goes on and on, but Buddy prides himself on having stolen only what others could get along without and never killing anyone without trying real hard not to. In all, twenty-three men were sent to their graves by Buddy’s swift arm and discerning trigger finger. He does not regret a one of them neither, unless any member of the posse he gunned down included orphans, like himself, who never had anyone to teach them right from wrong. When I questioned him about his remarkable speed with a sidearm, Buddy replied, “I had to shoot real fast if I wanted to swallow another breath. Guess I was just hungrier for air than them others.”

      Goings: Many will sigh with relief on hearing that Jack Finney of Topeka, Kansas, left town yesterday by the hand of Buddy Baker (his first beyond the grave and just four hours after his arrival). Jack had been the fastest gun in town for a decade. He came to Damnation at the age of seventeen, after losing his first and last earthly gunfight to a man who had called him yellow. When questioned throughout the years on his (until now) unmatchable speed, Jack always responded, “Fuck off, pencil pusher.” Since Jack only had the one gunfight before he came to Damnation, some reckoned his hankering for killing was fueled by his anger at never getting a chance to grow up or, as Red phrased it, “’cause he died with no hair on his balls.”

      Before he left, Jack finally got around to shooting the preacher in the throat. The old coot had been a little too vociferous in sharing his latest vision of fiery skies, a muddy earth that sprouts weeds, and the son of the devil himself being born here to vanquish us all, after the town grows some. Though the preacher was a tiresome man, his colorful banter did help to pass the time. It’s been rumored that he hailed from New Hampshire, where he had succumbed to frostbite while being a Peeping Tom.

      Oh, and some newbie got his hand taken off by the vampire, so Sal put him out of his misery with his scattergun. I didn’t get a chance to find out where he was from, but his name started with the letters F-R-E. He had the sadness.

      Chapter 3

      Ms. Parker

      One evening a couple of weeks after Buddy arrived, a young lady walked into the Foggy Dew wearing a white wedding dress and sopping wet, which was odd since it never rained in Damnation.

      Every so often, a woman would turn up. Usually, she’d have killed her husband for cheating, then got hanged for it. One lady had killed her sister for sleeping with her husband. Another had smothered her baby with a pillow just so folks’d pity her grief. Womenfolk never lasted long. Right away, the men started quarrelling over them. Often, a woman would promise herself to one man then go off with another. It was easy for them to get mixed up since there wasn’t no Bible to follow, and they didn’t have to worry about their reputations no more. Seldom did any of them have shooting or card-playing skills. Wasn’t much else to prize in Damnation, so the only thing of value they had was beneath their skirt. Usually a woman got shot within a week, and a lot of the fellas’d say it was good riddance on account of the headaches she’d caused.

      We never had any women as proper or as pretty as Ms. Parker though. Shivering in the doorway, her wet dress clung to her body revealing the shape of her slender frame. Her round dimpled cheeks were as pale as moonbeams. The men all glared at her. It must’ve been shock that caused it. She swooned and sort of drifted to the ground like a feather. Even her fainting had some grace to it.

      “Get her to a chair!” Sal ordered.

      A couple of sodbusters carried her over to a poker table. After a sip of coffee, she wanted to know where she was.

      “Tell her,” Sal said to me.

      “I don’t wanna,” I said. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I didn’t want to be the one to crush her spirit. When she woke up that morning, she had her whole life ahead of her. Now, she was in a sunless afterlife full of unsavory types. “Why’s it always gotta be me?”

      “You’re the dang reporter,” Sal said. “Now report!”

      “Seems like more of a booze clerk’s job to break bad news,” I argued. “Or what about that preacher fella?”

      “Jack shot ’em in the throat for yapping about the end times, ’member?”

      “Maybe she’s better off not knowing,” I offered.

      “She’s gonna find out sooner or later,” Red said.

      “Maybe not.” Sal smirked.

      “You know I can hear you?” the lady reminded us.

      “Well, ma’am,” I explained. “I’m sorry to say, but you ain’t among the living no more.”

      She pressed her hands against her face and began to weep softly. Then she cried out loudly, “Oh, Henry! Please forgive me, Henry!” It must’ve hit her then that she wasn’t ever going to see her sweetheart again. The poor girl collapsed on the table, burying her face in her sleeve.

      Sal poured some whiskey into her Arbuckle’s to take the edge off. Stumpy fetched an old blanket from the storage room upstairs to warm her up, while I filled her in on the particulars of Damnation, much as I knew them. She sat blank-eyed and listened. It ain’t easy hearing that the God you’ve been praying to all your life deserted you in the foyer to hell with a vampire, some werewolves, and a mess of lecherous card players. She took it pretty well, considering. Then she began to unburden herself about the last day of her life. It had been her wedding day, and she got caught in a compromising position with another man.

      “I didn’t do anything improper—I swear! I just couldn’t push him off me quick enough,” she explained. “My father owed the man money, and he was threatening to take our grocery store.

Скачать книгу