A Lust For Lead (5 page)

He had found Buchanan at the end of the hall, standing over the bodies of two of Babson’s men and grinning like a madman. His face was splashed with blood, none of it his own. ‘Shit, was that fun or what?’
Shane said nothing. Killing the woman and her child had dampened his enthusiasm for the night’s proceedings and he wanted to be done and gone from the place as soon as possible so that he could put it out of his mind. He had never killed a child before and could not understand why he had done it this time.
He became aware that Buchanan had asked him a question.
‘Did you get him?’ Buchanan repeated.
‘Who?’
‘Hunte. Who do you fucking think?’
Shane shook his head. ‘No.’ He didn’t think so.
Buchanan was jaunty. ‘Well, let’s go find him then, shall we?’
They searched the upper floor room by room. In one, they found Babson’s youngest daughter. She had tried to hide herself under her bed but Buchanan heard her whimpering and dragged her out. He slapped her across the face. ‘Where is he?’ he shouted. ‘Where’s Hunte?’
The girl was too hysterical to answer. Buchanan subdued her with a punch that knocked her senseless, then tied her up. They did not find Hunte, but in one room further down the hall they discovered an open window and a rope of knotted sheets that hung to the ground below. Clothes were scattered from an open case and it was clear that Benedict Hunte had made a hurried escape.
‘Well that’s just fucking great!’ Buchanan swore violently.
Shane shared his sentiment but did not voice it. He thought of the dead woman and her child again. It was doubly unprofessional of him to have killed them but let his intended target get away. ‘We’ll find him,’ he promised resolutely.
They picked up Hunte’s trail outside. He had run to the corral, where he had opened the gate and panicked the horses so that most of them had fled. Hunte had presumably taken one of them but the confusion of tracks was so great that they would have to wait until daylight to make sense of them.
Shane turned to face Buchanan, his hand straying towards his gun. The need for an alliance between them was ended now that Babson’s men were gone.
‘Fuck it!’ Buchanan said. ‘I ain’t in the mood.’
Shane could have shot him anyway but it would have been an empty victory. Some day in the future he knew that their paths would cross again, and when that time came they would fight each other on equal footing. How else could they learn for certain which of them was the better man?
Until then, they went their separate ways. Buchanan stalked back into the ranch house and soon the Babson girl began to scream. Shane blanked the sounds from his mind and walked away. As he left the ranch, he passed the sentry that he had knocked unconscious. The boy was awake and rising to his feet. Shane coldly shot him through the head without breaking his stride.

Sunlight streamed through the boarded-up windows of the house that Kip Kutcher had claimed as his own. It pierced the gloom in beams that were heavy with dust and lighted on him as he struggled into his pants.
‘Do you think there’ll be any action on the side?’ he asked.
His girlfriend lay half-wrapped in the tangle of their bedroll, her tanned skin glistening with sweat. Her hair was bedraggled and lay half across her face and shoulders in sleepy disarray. ‘There must be,’ she mumbled. ‘Why wouldn’t there be?’
‘I don’t know. Most of the people here seem kinda stiff.’ Kip answered. He had tried to get a game of cards going the other day but no one had been interested. The invigilators were strictly business and the other contestants hadn’t wanted anything to do with him. Only the Canadian, Daniel Blaine, had been willing to speak with him and he had expressed no desire to play against a card shark.
‘They just don’t now how to have a good time is their problem.’ Madison said. She wriggled one arm free of the bedroll and lifted it above her head, stretching languorously and arching her back with a moan. She ended the stretch by rolling onto her side, facing Kip and studying him with heavy-lidded eyes.
Kip was just nineteen years old, a stringy, handsome youth with a mop of yellow-brown hair that flopped down over his brow. His ribs showed through the skin of his chest and his arms were skinny, but he was impressive in so many other ways. He picked up a shirt from the debris that constituted his unpacking, shook it to rid it of any insects that had crawled in during the night, and put it on.
‘Just remember what I told you,’ the girl warned him. ‘Freeman is good. He’s killed more than eighty men.’
‘But I bet he isn’t as fast as me.’
She smiled. ‘No, he isn’t. No one is.’
‘Then we’re cool. Hey, do you want to hear something really wild?’
‘What?’
‘I overheard some of the invigilators talking yesterday. You know Colonel Hartshorne put up a reward for whoever could bring Shane Ennis to him? Well, Buchanan killed the men who found him and brought it all back here.’
The girl raised herself up onto her elbows, suddenly wide-awake. ‘What, all of it?’
‘That’s right, and I bet you can’t guess how much it was. Twenty-thousand dollars, can you imagine that? Just for one man.’
Madison was amazed.
‘I’m wondering if maybe they’ll add it to the prize money.’ Kip said. ‘I wonder how much that’ll make it.’
‘They still haven’t said?’ Madison asked.
Kip shook his head. ‘Not yet. But there’s got to be something. Being ranked as one of the Fastest Guns is all nice and fancy and everything, but you can’t have a tournament and not have prize money. What’d be the point?’
The girl smiled. ‘What would you do with the money if you won?’ she asked.
Kip walked over and crouched beside her. ‘Baby, I’d spend it all on you.’
‘Mmm, good answer,’ she said, and pulled him to her.

Shane was released from his cell at ten o’clock and taken out onto the street where the other contestants had begun to gather in anticipation of the tournament’s opening bout. It was a bright and clear morning, the sky a bleached shade of pale blue in which the sun burned like an open sore. Scarcely a breeze disturbed the turgid air.
Nathaniel’s invigilators were out in force. Four stood on the rooftops overlooking the crossroads while six more guarded the streets. Two more flanked the Grande’s porch, where Nathaniel reclined, eating an orange in the shade, Whisperer towering behind him.
There was a bench against the courthouse wall and Buchanan seated himself at one end. Shane was disinclined to sit with him and chose to stand instead. He leaned against the remaining upright of the half-broken porch and let his gaze roam across the assembled gunfighters.
Kip Kutcher and his girlfriend sat on the boardwalk opposite, the girl reclining in the sun while Kutcher chattered inanely. She was dressed in a pair of tight buckskin pants and a man’s white shirt that she had tied short, exposing the smooth, flat skin of her midriff. Her appearance attracted looks from several of the men, David Sullivan being one of them.
He sat on the edge of the boardwalk outside of O’Malley’s, absent-mindedly playing with a handful of dirt. He would let it slide between his fingers into his open palm, then switch hands and repeat the process again and again, nervously occupying himself until the time came for him to face Matt Nesbitt on the crossroads.
Shane hoped that Nesbitt would win. He despised David Sullivan. Out of all the bounty hunters that had pursued him during the last six years, Sullivan had been the most determined. Had it not been for him, Shane might have vanished into obscurity years ago but Sullivan had always been there wherever he had fled, following him like a shadow and never giving him chance to rest. Twice, Sullivan had almost succeeded in catching him, and on one of those occasions he had put a bullet in Shane’s leg that still caused him to limp sometimes when the weather was humid.
Matt Nesbitt was a grim and solemn-looking man in his late-thirties with a square-jaw and fierce, unforgiving eyes. He was every bit as imposing as his reputation made him out to be. In 1878, Nesbitt had brought order to the town of Averil by killing every man who broke the law. Three years later, he had done the same at Valour, and then again two years after that at the notorious cattle town of Packard’s Well. There were some who said that he was a man in love with violence and that the only law he enforced was a law of his own choosing. He was famously precise in all things, from the symmetrical cut of his moustache to the polished buckle on his belt. He reached into his pocket for a watch that had been a gift to him from the grateful people at Valour, checked the time, then snapped the watch shut. He straightened his waistcoat, adjusted the cuffs of his shirtsleeves and strode out into the crossroads to take his place.
Realising that it was time, Sullivan let his last handful of dirt fall to the roadside and brushed his hands off on his pants before following his opponent.
They took up position on either side of the crossroads: Nesbitt to the north and Sullivan to the south. An expectant hush settled over the town and even Kutcher fell silent as they all waited for Nathaniel to give the signal for the tournament to begin.
Shane held his breath.
‘Gentlemen.’ Nathaniel rose to his feet and laid his hands on the wooden porch rail. ‘The tournament will begin when you are ready to fire.’
His voice travelled clearly over the crossroads.
The two contestants stared at each other but neither of them moved.
And then Matt Nesbitt suddenly wrenched his gun from its holster. He shot from the hip, the flat of his palm striking three times against the hammer in rapid succession, fanning off a blaze of shots. They hit Sullivan and tore straight through him as if his body was made of wax, the first striking him in the belly, the second in his chest and the third ripping through his shoulder and picking him up, spinning him around and flinging him to the ground.
As he landed, his head rolled over and his dull, lifeless eyes – fixed wide in a look of frozen astonishment – flung a last accusing stare towards Shane.
The tournament had claimed its first victim.

Invigilators came in from the sides of the street and dragged the carcass away while Nathaniel offered his congratulations to the winner.
‘Next match in one hour!’ he called, and the contestants dispersed until then.
Buchanan was laughing, slapping his knee as he rocked backwards on the bench. ‘And that man actually thought he could beat you?’ he said. ‘The Shane I used to know would have killed him years ago.’
Shane very nearly had. It was in 1879 that he had shot David’s brother. Chris Sullivan had been the sheriff of a Wyoming cattle town known as Ladd’s Corner. He was a good and honest man, which had been his downfall. A local beef baron had taken offence to him locking up his boys when they got rowdy and so had taken steps to remove him. Chris had stood firm, backed up by his deputy and by his younger brother. David was a drifter in those days and had come to town looking to bum a few dollars off his brother to cover a gambling debt. Together, the three of them had fought off every attempt to put pressure on them and finally Shane had been called in to put an end to it all.
News travelled quickly in Ladd’s Corner, as it was prone to do in any small town, and Chris had gotten wind that Shane was coming. He had known that he hadn’t stood a chance of survival but he had stayed anyway and faced Shane like a man. David had not been so courageous. He had skipped town and had not heard of his brother’s death until three days after it had happened.
‘I bet you wish it had been you.’ Buchanan whispered in his ear. ‘Wouldn’t you have rather been the one who killed him?’
Shane did not want to think about it. Of course he wished it had been him. To Shane’s way of thinking, David’s mission of vengeance had been an affront to his brother’s memory. Chris Sullivan had been a man of principle and Shane had respected him. David, meanwhile, was a coward who had waited five years – until long after Shane had laid down his guns and sworn never to shoot again – before finding the courage to avenge his brother’s death. Shane would have loved to have been the one to kill him, and he would not have shown him the mercy that he had shown his brother by making it quick.
But that was not the sole reason that Shane would have liked to have taken Matt Nesbitt’s place. A part of him longed just to fire a gun again, to handle the power that had once been his to command. He yearned for it, but at the same time he was afraid of it. For Shane knew the secret of the Fastest Guns and he had barely escaped from them the last time.
The second match drew the contestants back to the crossroads. It was Chastity’s turn to fight and so far the enigmatic gunfighter had yet to be seen by any of the contestants. Shane was eager to catch a glimpse of her and learn her measure, as was her opponent, Escoban Cadero.
The Mexican bandit leader swaggered from O’Malley’s and drained the last of a bottle of beer before tossing it aside and letting it break against the saloon wall. Hands on his hips, he searched about for his opponent, then strode boldly out into the crossroads to wait for her.
He was a singularly foul-looking man. In the deserts where he lived, the springtime winds blew up sandstorms so violent that they were known to strip the flesh from a man’s bones. Cadero had weathered countless such storms, often using them as cover when he raided the villages and ranches of that land, and his face and arms were covered with scars where the sands had bitten deep. His beard and moustache were thick and matted with grease, his hair long and wild. His eyes were as black as the night and narrow from squinting into the ravenous winds.
He took advantage of Chastity’s absence to choose to stand on the northern side of the crossroads, superstitiously avoiding the spot where David Sullivan had died. Having taken his place, he heaved at his shirts with meaty hands and tore them apart, exposing a muscled chest that was coarse with thick, black hair. The sunlight glimmered on half a dozen gold chains that hung around his neck.
He roared, flecking spittle from his rotten gums. ‘Where is she then? Where is this little puta who would fight me?’
There was no answer and Cadero laughed contemptuously. ‘Perhaps she has dresses to mend, or is too busy cooking dinner, no?’
He raised his voice in a sing-song: ‘Come out, senora. Don’t be shy. Escoban has something for you.’ He gestured obscenely.
His challenges echoed desolately through Covenant’s abandoned streets and a long moment passed in which nobody moved. Then, the door of the Grande hotel creaked slowly open.
Nathaniel emerged, followed by Whisperer, and they were not alone. They were accompanied by a thin, pale woman. She was in her mid-thirties with long brown hair that hung straight and without style. She moved timidly, her eyes pointed down at the ground and by her manner Shane judged that she was used to being beaten.
She led a child by the hand: a young girl who could not have been more than seven or eight years old; who wore a pink dress and had ribbons in her hair. Incongruously, she also wore a gun belt fastened around her waist, the holster empty and about the right size for a small pocket gun.
Shane turned and shot Buchanan a withering glare. It was unconscionable that someone so young was competing. Buchanan only grinned. ‘She’s not what you expected, is she? Don’t be fooled by how she looks. That little bitch might even give you a run for your money.’
Shane felt the deepest revulsion. He turned back to see that the girl had been passed over to Nathaniel, who was now leading her down the wooden steps from the porch. There was something odd about the way she moved, her steps wooden and unbalanced, as if walking was unfamiliar to her.
‘Nathaniel found her in an asylum in New England.’ Buchanan explained. ‘One of the doctors there sold her to him for twenty bucks.’
She had reached the foot of the steps and Nathaniel steered her toward the crossroads. Her feet scuffed in the dirt and Shane noticed that her attention was elsewhere. Her eyes, unblinking, seemed fixed on something that only she could see.
Escoban Cadero thought she was a joke. ‘What is this?’ he demanded. ‘You expect me to shoot a child?’
‘If you can,’ Nathaniel replied. ‘But I assure you it won’t be as easy as you think.’
‘You play games with me.’
‘No. No games. Chastity has the same right to be here as any of you.’
Cadero shrugged. ‘It makes no difference to me,’ he said. ‘It will not be the first time that I have killed a child.’
Nathaniel had to steer the girl by the shoulders to get her to face Cadero. Even then, she seemed unaware of his presence. Her gaze wandered, eyes distant. Her arms hung uselessly by her sides.
‘She’s got no mind.’ Buchanan explained. ‘No will. Nothing. That girl’s a clean slate.’
His meaning was perfectly clear to Shane and it provoked an anger in him that was fiercer than anything he had known in years.
A clean slate.
The idea of it was so terrible that he did not want to believe it was true, and yet the proof was right there in front of him.
He watched as Nathaniel reached into his jacket and withdrew a small, double-action .41 calibre pocket revolver. With only a three inch barrel it was just the right size for Chastity’s small hands. Nathaniel set it in her holster and, before he left, he whispered in her ear. ‘Make daddy proud,’ he said, and then hurried from the crossroads as if he had just lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite.
Escoban Cadero snorted irritably, still convinced that he was being fooled with. Chastity was not even looking at him. She stared blindly at the roadside, her head cocked to one side, arms limp.
Then she blinked. The change that came over her was so abrupt that Shane’s breath caught in his throat. Her eyes suddenly became focussed and her head straightened on her shoulders and turned about mechanically to face towards Cadero, who gasped with surprise. ‘Que pasa?’
‘Now he’s for it.’ Buchanan said, his voice an excited whisper.
‘Contestants!’ Nathaniel shouted. ‘You may fire when ready.’
Escoban Cadero reached instantly for his gun.
And the side of his head exploded in a violent shower of blood.
His body stood there, gently swaying back and forth while the contents of his head pattered down around him like a heavy shower of rain. Then his knees gave way and he crumpled on the spot.
He had not even had time to draw his gun from its holster.
Shane was awestruck. He had never seen anybody draw so fast. All around him, the town was gripped in silence as people stared, dumbstruck by Chastity’s skill.
The girl stood motionless, her arm extended and still pointing her diminutive revolver at the spot where Escoban Cadero had stood. She had not moved at all since she had killed him, remaining frozen on the spot as if held in a state of shock. There was a look of confusion in her eyes, as if she was unable to make a connection between the body on the ground and the man who had stood before her. It looked to Shane as if she was disappointed that she had killed him already. It had all been over too quickly for her. She wanted to kill him again.
The invigilators who were supposed to take away Cadero’s body were understandably reluctant to go forward while she was still so dangerously poised. Nathaniel derided them for their timidity.
No will of her own, Shane thought, and cursed bitterly to himself. The girl’s plight cut through his own self-pity and he grieved for the loss of her innocence.
Cautiously, Nathaniel walked up behind her and gently reached out his hand to encircle her wrist. ‘It’s over now, cherub,’ he said, speaking softly. ‘All done for today.’
The girl cocked her head sideways and looked up at him, uncomprehending. The look of cold hatred in her eyes was something that Shane had never thought to see in a child so young. Nathaniel prised the gun from her hand.
Chastity suddenly threw back her head and screamed. It was a noise of pure, animal loss, as if Nathaniel had reached into her body and torn out her soul. The force of it was incredible. Even at a distance, it sent a stab of pain ripping through Shane’s ears that made him flinch. Those contestants closest to her blocked their ears with their hands.
Nathaniel had clearly expected her reaction and had beaten a hasty retreat to the side of the road. ‘Bethan! Take her inside.’
The girl’s nanny came scurrying over and gathered Chastity into her arms. The girl fought violently, striking with balled fists and kicking while the woman tried to subdue her. In the end, Nathaniel had to shout for one of his invigilators to grab her, and the girl was unceremoniously tucked under one arm and carried back into the hotel while Bethan fluttered at her side, making ineffectual shushing noises to try and calm her down.
Her screaming became muffled as the door was closed behind her and the resultant silence was uncomfortable, with nobody knowing what to make of what they had just witnessed. Nathaniel smiled reassuringly, dismissing Chastity’s outburst as just an ordinary child’s tantrum. He turned and nodded across the street to Buchanan, who nodded back in reply, some comment going unspoken between them. Nathaniel then joined Whisperer and the two men disappeared into the Grande.
‘She’s quite something, isn’t she?’ Buchanan said.
Shane was not interested in making small talk. He wanted the facts. ‘How long?’ he asked.
‘Nathaniel’s had her shooting for a couple of months now. She took to it right away, didn’t even need to be shown or nothing. Girl’s a complete natural.’
‘How many has she killed?’
‘Not many.’ Buchanan replied. ‘Ten, maybe twelve.’
Not many? Shane wanted to laugh except that it wasn’t funny. Nathaniel had taken a child with no will of her own and turned her into the perfect killer, accomplishing in her what it had taken Shane more than twenty years of practice to achieve.
Chastity was damned, just as surely as he was.
And she had had no say in the matter.