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| Image (c) 2007 Jim Emery Photography |
Not sure I managed to pull it off but it was great fun to write all the same.
A Meeting in Desolation
The sky above them was a lurid purple and filled with fading
stars when they first caught sight of the town of Desolation, a jagged silhouette
framed against the yellow horizon of the dawn.
Five days hard riding to reach this, little more than a godforsaken
collection of ramshackle houses and barns on the edge of the desert. The name
seemed appropriate; Desolation wasn’t much of a town at all. Not much of
anything, truth be told.
“How
far out are we?” asked Little Jake, wiping hair from his brown eyes as he
stared off into the distance.
“I say
less than half a day’s ride if we get a wiggle on,” smiled Ike the Knife thinly.
“Why, we’ll be all done here in time for lunch.”
All of
them apart from Six Finger Bob laughed at this. Not the natural kind of
laughter, not the kind you make at a good joke; this was the kind of laughter a
man makes when he’s nervous and he’s trying to use it to stoke up his courage
some. All the men who laughed were nervous, but not one of them would admit it.
“I’m
ready for this,” said Big Jake, eyes hidden beneath the shadow of his hat’s
brim. “This day’s been a long time coming.”
“Hell,
what we waiting for then?” said Slim Decker, spitting a mouthful of brown tobacco
to the dusty ground. “Let’s go do what we came here for.”
“No.”
said Six Finger Bob. It was the first word he’d spoken to any of them in hours.
They
all turned to look at him as he reined his horse in with his one good hand and
slid smoothly from the saddle. They were bad men, all four of them, but they
knew better than to speak out of turn around Six Finger Bob. He looked at them each in turn, his cold
black eyes boring into them as if seeking a challenge to his command.
“We rest up here a while is what
we do.”
There were a few seconds of silence as the men
shared glances between themselves before Ike finally spoke up.
“Why rest though, Bob? We can
ride down there and finish this right now.”
“That right is it, Ike?” said
Bob, taking a drag from his quirly and blowing a cloud of blue smoke into the
air, black eyes on Ike. “So, how long is it you been waiting to get your hands
on Ringo then, Ike?”
Ike turned his head away, unable
to meet his stare for more than second.
“Well I’ll tell you, Ike,” he continued.
“You been waiting a long time, just like the rest of these fellas.”
He took a long drag on the
quirly, its tip glowing red in the early morning light.
“Now, we all of us here got good
reason to be wanting Ringo dead and we all of us been looking to make it happen
for some years. But yet none of us ever managed it, have we?”
He threw the remains of the still
smoking quirly to the floor.
“I’ll tell you why.”
He placed the heel of his boot
over the quirly, watching the tendrils of blue smoke that coiled from it.
“Because we got sloppy.”
He ground his heel hard into the
dirt.
“Because we got lazy.”
Ground again, twisting his heel
left and right.
“Because we took us the easy path
when the path we should have been treading was the path that required us to
show patience.”
He looked up at them, pushing the
brim of his hat up with the one finger he had remaining on his left hand.
“Now, today we’re gonna do it
right. Today, we’re going to rest up and then we’re gonna ride into town and kill
Danny Ringo. ”
* * *
The man who once went by the name Danny Ringo was in the
saloon, fourth bourbon of the night in his hand, when he heard the horse hooves
echoing in the street outside. Five horses walking slow by the sound of it. No
one else in the saloon had even noticed, let alone cared, but the man hadn’t
lived as long as he had without coming to trust his instincts. Five horses in
this town, on this night, felt wrong.
He
drained his shot glass in one mouthful and placed it on the bar, eyes fixed on
the street outside the saloon door. Five men on horseback cantered slowly by;
too dark to see their eyes but he could feel their ill intent as something
tangible. He had always known a night like this would come, he just hadn’t
expected it to come quite so soon.
“You
still got that old shotgun under the counter, Stu?” he asked the barman, gaze
flickering to the older man for but a fraction of a second.
“Surely
do,” smiled the barman with a grin that exposed his wooden false teeth. “Why
you asking, Sheriff?”
“I’m
going to need you to make sure you keep it there,” he said, his black eyes
glittering in the dimly lit room and, for a moment, the barman saw not Lionel
Dobbs, who’d served as town sheriff for the last year, but the face of a man whose name
was still spoken in reverent tones in three different states. “You keep it
there, no matter what happens.”
He cast
his gaze across the room; a couple of prospectors already half roostered and some
ranch hands playing out a hand of cards on the far side of the saloon. He stood
up and walked to the centre of the room, right hand perched on his hip, fingers
dangling close to the Remington 1858 in his holster. He knew he could send them
out, make sure they were out of harm’s way, but to do so would tip his hand to
the men outside. So, instead he took a
seat at a table at the back of the saloon, deep in the shadows, and waited.
He didn’t
have to wait long.
Four
men entered the bar, swinging the saloon doors open wide and strutting in,
kicking up handfuls of sawdust with every step, their coats tucked back behind
their holsters to show they were all heeled. The saloon instantly became
deathly silent. The card game stopped mid-game, the men shrinking away into the
corner. Stu, the barman, stepped further back behind the counter.
“Where
you at Danny Ringo?” said the shortest of the four. “We want a word with you.”
“Ain’t
no one of that name here,” he said from the shadows, “so why don’t you boys
save yourselves some trouble and walk on out of here?”
“That’s
him,” said Ike, hand twitching at his side, “I recognise that voice.”
“And I
recognise you, Ike Stinson. But that is a
life I’ve put behind me and I suggest you try and do the same.”
“Listen
to this cocksucker,” spat Big Jake, “talking like he’s the one in control. You ain’t
in control here Ringo.”
“All I
can do is offer you my friendly advice. Now, up until this point, I’ve had no cause
to have beef with any one of you four gentleman, any debts we might once have
had have been long since settled to my mind.”
“You
killed my brother,” said Slim, his face reddening. “You killed him dead up in
Abilene. That is a debt you are going to have to repay today.”
He said
nothing for a few seconds.
“I killed a lot of men in
Abilene.”
He pressed his knees up beneath
the rough wooden surface of the table, his left hand motionless on the
tabletop, his right on the grip of the Remington.
“Now, I am thinking the talking
here between us is at an end. So you boys have a choice. You can turn around
and walk away from this or you can continue with a course of action that I am certain will not end well for you.”
A moment, frozen in time. And
then chaos reigned.
Little Jake went for his gun
first, the movement betrayed by a twitch in his shoulder and in one fluid
motion, he was pushing the table up and towards the four of them with his knees
while his other hand was sliding the Remington smoothly from its holster,
bringing it up in an arc. One shot and Little Jake went stumbling to the floor,
his hand never quite managing to reach his gun. Two shots and he took Big Jake in
the chest, the big man’s face frozen in a permanent expression of surprise. And
then he was moving, leaving the table behind even as Ike and Slim opened up
with their pistols, both firing wild and wide. A sidestep and suddenly the
angles were all wrong for them both. Third shot tore away half of Ike Stimson’s
face. Fourth and fifth shots took Slim Decker in the chest and shoulder,
spinning him around and sending him sprawling across a tabletop like some kind
of ragdoll. Smoke curled upwards from the barrel of his gun. Less than five
seconds gone since Little Jake made his ill-advised move.
Slow clapping echoed in from the
street.
He flipped the revolver open and
smoothly changed the cylinder out for a fresh one. He knew who was outside waiting
for him; the only man who’d ever been faster than him.
“You send them in to try and
soften me up. Bob?” he shouted through the saloon door.
“Nah, I just wanted to see if you
still had it. See, if that bunch of shave tails had done for you then you weren’t
the man I remembered. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t wasting my time here.”
“So you sent these four boys to
die for your amusement?”
“Well, listen to old Danny Ringo,
preaching to me. Surely not that the
same Danny Ringo I rode with for nearly four years? Surely not the same old stone
cold son-of-a-bitch that killed more men than I could count? Why you have changed, Danny.”
“I’m a different man.”
“Well, surely that’s a
coincidence. Because I’m a changed man too, Danny. Last time I saw you, you did
a good job of changing me.
“I guess that means you’ve not
forgiven me for what went down in Wichita then?”
“Lost me four fingers that day. A
man, he doesn’t tend to forgive a thing like that.”
“Day
could have gone a lot worse for you.”
“You
know what they call me now, Danny? They call me Six Finger Bob. Not to my face,
you understand, because I’d kill them. But I know that’s what they call me behind
my back. And that’s on you, Danny. So what say you step on outside and we dance
one last time.”
He took
a deep breath, holstered the Remington and stepped out through the saloon doors
and into the cool night. Bob was standing on the far side of the street. He was
clearly the same man he had once known, but he seemed far older, his face
haggard and his moustache flecked with grey. He was wearing the same blood-dark
waistcoat that he had always favoured, the same mother-of-pearl handled Colt in
his right holster. The left holster was conspicuously empty.
“Took a
long time to track you down, you know that Danny?”
“I didn’t
leave no forwarding address. Wasn’t expecting no visitors.”
“Oh, I’m
sure you always knew someone was going to come calling one day.”
“Yep.
And I always figured it would be you.”
He took
two paces across the street and into the moonlight, hand only inches from the
Remington at his side.
“Sheriff?” laughed Bob, seeing
the badge on his chest for the first time.
“Times
have changed.”
“Surely
they have, Danny. But I’ll tell you one thing that hasn’t changed. I’m still
faster than you.”
“Guess
we’ll just have to find out.”
“Guess
we will.”
They
stood facing each other at a distance of twenty paces, the pale silvery light illuminating
them and casting papery shadows along the length of the street. Hands at their
sides, coats swept back from their holsters. Eyes narrowed, neither man
blinked.
And
then they moved.
The motion was faster than the human
eye could follow, little more than a blur as two guns were drawn in tandem and
two shots cracked loud in the still night air.
One body hit the ground, hard.
The man that had been left
standing touched his right hand gingerly to his left shoulder, where his opponent’s
bullet had struck home. Warm blood pulsed from the wound, seeping through the
material of his shirt. He winced at the pain that stabbed hotly at him and
walked across the street to where his opponent lay, twisted and broken in the
dirt amid blood that pooled, black beneath the moonlight.
“You were always faster,” he said
through gritted teeth, picking the pearl-handled Colt up from the ground. “Shame
you never could aim for shit.”
