A Lust For Lead (14 page)

It was almost noon – the Gunfighter’s Hour – when Shane left the bathhouse. The sun was high and the water that he had spilled from the pump when drawing for his bath had already dried out, leaving the ground as parched there as anywhere else.
Covenant was a dead town and there were no birds to lend it a voice, not even a scavenger like a crow or a buzzard, and the sound of Shane’s boots as they crunched on the dry earth seemed magnified as he walked towards the gap he had made in the fence. He was just nearing it when he heard footsteps approaching from down the alley that led onto West Street. There was not enough time for him to duck through the fence and so he stayed his ground, reasoning that if the invigilators had found him it was better to go quietly than risk getting shot by running away.
As it was, the footsteps did not belong to any invigilators; they belonged to Madison, Whisperer and Chastity.
‘Bathhouse is popular this afternoon.’ Shane said, tipping his hat to the lady. She gave him a smile in return.
Whisperer frowned at him. ‘Should you be here alone?’
He was stood too close to the hole in the fence for Whisperer not to put two and two together and Shane didn’t see the point in trying to play the innocent. ‘Would I be here if I shouldn’t?’ he replied.
The tall man smiled thinly. Shane could read most men pretty well, but Whisperer was an enigma to him. Just being around him made him feel distinctly uncomfortable and he was reminded of what Nanache had told him the night before: He is devil-kind, like you are.
Whisperer was no gunslinger but there were plenty other demons in Hell besides the Fastest Guns, and Shane wondered what he was halfway to becoming.
‘It’s not often that we see you come out from Nathaniel’s shadow.’ Shane observed. ‘Is it that he doesn’t trust you? Or do you not trust him?’
Whisperer gave a secretive smile. ‘Buchanan was right,’ he said. ‘Killing Devlin has changed your attitude. When I first met you Mister Ennis, you could scarcely be encouraged to say a word. Now here you are trying to bait me. Perhaps there’s hope for you yet.’
‘That depends on what you’re hoping for.’
‘No Mister Ennis, I think it depends more on what you’re hoping to achieve here.’
Shane went quiet. He didn’t like it when other people read his character better than he read theirs. He backed up to the hole in the fence. ‘Nice talking to you,’ he said curtly.
‘The pleasure was all mine.’ Whisperer replied.

Shane ducked through the fence and hurried away. He did not feel good about running away from Whisperer but every instinct in his gut told him to get away from him. The man scared him in a way that nobody else ever did and he was left asking himself questions that he was sure he didn’t want answered.
He didn’t think that Whisperer would send anybody after him but, just to be on the safe side, he circled around a bit, cutting through alleyways and old buildings and doubling back to confuse his tracks. He still had the better part of an hour left before the next fight began and he wanted to use it to get the lay of the town.
He wandered by a roundabout route to the edge of town. He didn’t want to risk getting shot at by any of Nathaniel’s guards, so he stopped before he reached the last building and looked out into the wasteland.
There was no cover, not as far as the eye could see. The barren landscape was totally flat with only sparse patches of a limp and withered grass to break the monotony. The ground had been baked solid and was cracked in places like broken crockery, but nowhere was there a trench or a hole deep enough to hide in. The perimeter guards had absolute mastery of the land out to as far as they could shoot, which, Shane was willing to judge, had to be a good thousand yards or more.
Simply put, there was no way he could sneak out of town. The only way to get past the perimeter guards would be to punch a hole straight through them and Shane figured he would need to kill at least three of them to make a big enough gap to ride through. That was a lot of killing and he would definitely need help.
Not heartened by this discovery, he headed back towards the heart of town and walked among the streets, getting a feel for Covenant’s layout. It was simple enough. The whole town had sprung up around the central crossroads and, viewed from above, was arranged something like a rough oval with a cross etched through it. Townhouses near the centre; stockyards, warehouses and scattered buildings around the edges.
It was a dead place. A festering death trap that should have crumbled into the desert years ago. And yet everywhere Shane went he could feel the town watching him with eyes that hadn’t been human in at least six years.
After twenty minutes or so, he found the feeling oppressive and turned back towards the crossroads, to where Buchanan would be waiting for him.
He was most of the way back when he passed a house that caught his attention. Its door was missing, leaving a great, dark wound in its face, from which a foul stench poured into the street. The dirt outside showed signs of heavy traffic: boot prints and a series of trails that indicated something had been dragged inside, but not out again. Shane got to thinking that he had found where the invigilators had been bringing the dead.
Curious, he covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve and ventured inside. The windows had all been boarded up, leaving only narrow gaps through which the sunlight pierced in thin, slanting beams. The smell of the place was overwhelming and Shane felt his gorge rise in disgust, making him choke.
Everywhere he looked, the room was crawling with swollen, black flies. They swarmed like shadows, deepening the gloom, and rose up in angry clouds around him the deeper he ventured. He felt them crawling through his hair and in his ears, scratching at his nose and eyes. He swatted them away, fighting to control a mounting sense of revulsion.
He found the dead piled against the back wall. By the light of the open doorway behind him, he saw that they were bloated with gases, their skin blistered and weeping pale fluids. Like everything else in the room, they were covered in the swarming flies, which made them even more unrecognisable.
Shane stared at them for some time, aware that something was not quite right about them but not sure what it was. He counted them.
He counted them again.
Back out in the street, he brushed the flies from his face and shook out his coat, retreating to a safe distance so that he could gulp at the air and try and rid himself of the stench. He felt sick and waited for the nausea to pass before reflecting on his discovery.
Eight contestants had died in the first round and so far two more had died in the second. Add to that the two invigilators that Chastity had shot, plus Bethan, and that came to thirteen dead in total.
And yet Shane had only counted twelve bodies.
Somebody was missing.

It was almost one o’clock by the time Shane returned to the courthouse. Buchanan was waiting for him, their argument seemingly forgotten. ‘What have you been up to?’ he asked.
‘I went for a walk.’ Shane replied. ‘I stopped by your mortuary. Did you know you’ve got a body missing?’
‘What?’ Buchanan was genuinely surprised, which confirmed Shane’s belief that the invigilators had not simply put the missing body somewhere else.
‘I guess that means you didn’t,’ he said, deliberately antagonizing Buchanan and watching as his temper rose to the surface again. This time Buchanan held it in check. ‘That bastard!’ he hissed, talking under his breath. ‘That fucking lying bastard.’
Shane did not press him to find out who he was talking about; he believed he had a pretty good idea already. He settled down on the edge of the boardwalk and put his back to Buchanan and looked for the two contestants who were due to fight next.
Tom Freeman and Evan Drager were evenly matched. They were both professional gunfighters and they both had more than eighty kills to their name. Drager stood by the side of the road with his head bowed in prayer. His injured leg didn’t seem to have affected him badly.
Freeman sat on the steps outside O’Malley’s and smoked what could very easily be his last cigar. Vendetta leaned against the wall a few yards distant from him but she looked away when Shane glanced at her and pretended that she hadn’t seen him. Shane was not discouraged. He could be patient, for a while at least.
Drager finished his prayers and Freeman finished his cigar and threw the stub away. They both looked at each other, nodded, and walked onto the crossroads. All around them, the invigilators took to their stations and rifles were cocked. Nathaniel moved to stand at the edge of the porch and checked his watch.
It was time.
Both gunfighters readied themselves. If Tom Freeman was in any way intimidated by his opponent’s reputation as the new messiah of the Fastest Guns, he did not show it. His right hand was poised just a couple of inches above the grip of his heavy revolver.
Drager’s face looked rapturous. His eyes were distant but his body was tense. Shane recognised that look. It was the expression of a man as he surrendered his will to the gun at his hip. He envied Drager that he could be so comfortable with it.
Nathaniel made the call. ‘Draw,’ he shouted, and the first shot was fired almost immediately.
Evan Drager staggered to one side. He had been shot in the chest. The injury threw his own shot wild and it grazed across Freeman’s cheek instead of opening his skull. Freeman dropped instinctively to one knee, making himself a smaller target, and sank two more bullets into Drager’s torso. His body jack-knifed, twitching violently as each bullet tore through flesh and bone and offal, to burst out of him again in a bloody splatter of ejected tissue, but still he refused to go down. He howled in pain and rage, spitting blood from his lips; and fanned off a lethal hail of bullets that drove Freeman to roll aside.
Freeman came up shooting. With his gun held in a two-handed grip, he grouped two shots within an inch of each other, shattering Drager’s lower jaw into fragments that speared deep into his throat and head. A horrible, gurgling scream rose up as Drager wheeled to the ground, blood gushing from his mouth. He caught himself on his hands and knees and, though clearly beyond any chance of survival, he doggedly extended his gun in Freeman’s direction and fired his last shot.
Startled, Freeman whipped to the side and the bullet clipped him across the ribs; a glancing blow. He retaliated with a shot that tore off the back of Drager’s head and, finally, Drager slumped to the ground.
He still twitched and mumbled despite the severity of his injuries and Freeman walked over to him and kicked his gun from his hand. He reloaded his revolver and fired three more shots into Drager’s head to finish him.
Silence returned to the crossroads and Tom Freeman lit a cigar.

Shane couldn’t say that he was surprised. Drager had been a true initiate of the Fastest Guns but, like a lot of men, he had never quite lived up to his own reputation.
‘Well, that about proves me right.’ Buchanan said smugly.
Shane met his eyes. ‘Being dead never stopped Priestley,’ he reminded him and watched with enjoyment as the smirk abruptly vanished from Buchanan’s face. Buchanan looked thoughtful then swore vehemently to himself. He called over the nearest invigilator. ‘Watch him!’ he ordered, and stomped off across the boardwalk.
Shane watched him hurry over to where three invigilators had gathered around Evan Drager’s corpse. Apparently they were locked in some kind of argument concerning whether or not he had been any kind of a messiah. Buchanan clouted one of them around the back of the head to disillusion him and then the four of them left the street, dragging Evan’s body with them. Shane waited until they were out of sight before getting to his feet.
His watchdog shot him a warning glance. ‘Sit down,’ he said.
Shane ignored him
The man drew his revolver. ‘Sit down,’ he repeated, and cocked back the hammer to prove that he meant it.
Shane gave him an insolent look. ‘We both know you’re not going to shoot me,’ he said. ‘Tell Buchanan that I’ve gone for a drink.’ He stepped past him and crossed the street to O’Malley’s, not once looking back. His watchdog made no further attempt to stop him.
Once inside, Shane walked straight to the bar and snatched a bottle of whisky off the counter. He found himself a seat against the back wall, a place where he could watch the doorway, and poured himself a drink. It was not long before he had company.
Vendetta came in casually and pretended not to see him. She walked to the counter, cracked open a bottle of beer and took a long, slow swig from it while she wrestled with her indecision. Shane decided to make it easy for her: ‘I went for a walk after you left,’ he said. ‘Want to know what I found?’
She pretended not to hear him.
‘Thirteen people have died since this tournament began. One of them has gone missing.’
That got her attention. ‘Who?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know, but it seems to me that the Fastest Guns have found someone they like already.’
He kicked out the chair opposite him and leaned back, inviting her to join him. She wandered over but did not sit, preferring to perch on the edge of the table opposite. She frowned at him. ‘What is it you want, Ennis?’
‘I want out of here.’
‘Running away again?’
‘As fast as I can. Which is what you’d do if you had any sense.’
Vendetta gave a cruel laugh. ‘So that’s what this is about. You want me to help you. Well forget it, Ennis. You deserve everything that’s coming to you.’
She got up off the table and walked away toward the butterfly-wing doors. The sun shining through the open doorway made her silhouette shine like a halo.
‘You’re right.’ Shane called after her. ‘Maybe I do deserve what’s coming to me, but you don’t. I know about what happened to your husband. I know how badly you want revenge.’
‘Everybody knows that story, Ennis. You don’t know shit!’
‘I know that if you go through with this the way you’ve been planning, you’ll end up like I am. Is that what your husband would have wanted for you?’
Vendetta rounded on him sharply and threw her half-empty bottle of beer. Her aim was true and Shane snatched it out of the air just a split second before it hit him. ‘Don’t you dare presume to know what he would have wanted!’ she raged. ‘He was a good man. A murderer like you would never understand him.’
Calmly, Shane wiped a few spots of beer from his face and set the bottle down on the table. ‘Can you remember what it was like when you didn’t feel angry at something or other?’ he asked. ‘That’s how it gets to you at first, through the anger and the hatred. It tightens like a fist around your heart. That’s what’s going to happen to you if you see this tournament through to the end.’
Vendetta was a smart woman. She was not completely blind to what she was getting herself into. She turned away, not letting him see the tears in her eyes. ‘It’s the only way,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He who lives by the Gun cannot die by the Gun.’
Shane recognised the words she was quoting. He had heard them before. It was said that a member of the Fastest Guns could not by killed by a bullet unless it was fired by another member of the Fastest Guns. Some people took it as a figure of speech, but Shane knew that it had never been meant that way.
‘There are other ways to kill Brett besides shooting him,’ he said.
Vendetta swore. ‘You’d have to be a fool to even try.’
‘I’m halfway to becoming one of them. Don’t you think that gives me some insight into what they are? Help me get out of this town and I’ll help you kill Brett.’
‘I don’t need your help, Ennis. I didn’t even ask for it.’
Shane leaned back in his chair with a sigh. ‘You take a bath every time you kill someone like you think it can wash their blood from your soul,’ he said. ‘Are you really telling me that you can go out onto that crossroads tomorrow and kill Chastity in good conscience, just so you can settle your score with Brett?’
‘I thought you said I couldn’t beat her.’
‘Just suppose for a moment that I’m wrong.’
It was clearly something that had been preying on Vendetta’s mind. She looked down at the ground and was silent for a long while. ‘I guess we’ll find out,’ she said.
‘What if I said I wanted to get Chastity out of here as well?’
She gave him a hard look. ‘Why would you do a thing like that?’
‘Same reason you would; she doesn’t deserve this.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought that would bother a man like you.’
‘Me neither,’ he agreed. ‘But it does. Will you help me?’
Vendetta thought about it. Moments later, she gave him her answer.