A Lust For Lead (9 page)

It was over before he knew what was happening. Seconds later, staring down the barrel of his gun as Devlin fell, he realised he had drawn and fired.
A numbness filled his soul. He could sense the gun’s exaltation raging through him and felt its triumph. But, mercifully, that triumph did not last long. The gun had been loaded with only a single bullet and it was impotent now that it was empty. Its silent scream of rage went ignored as Shane slowly lowered it and took a deep breath. He felt his chest expand, filling with air, the sensation real and grounding.
Out of the corner of his eye he was aware that Buchanan was approaching him, but he did not care. He had survived. His mind was still his own. For six years he had feared shooting a gun, dreading that it would consume him in one gulp. He had let that fear grow inside of him like a cancer until it had seemed that there was nothing else.
He felt empty now, burned out and hollowed. But like a forest that had been razed by fire, new shoots were beginning to sprout.
Buchanan came up beside him. ‘Good to see you haven’t lost your touch.’
Shane turned and hit him. The punch caught him across the jaw and Buchanan was knocked to the ground. Immediately, half a dozen rifles were aimed at Shane. The ratchet of their lever-actions echoed across the street as the invigilators readied themselves to fire. Shane slowly backed away and held up his hands to show that he wanted no more trouble. He tossed his revolver aside.
Buchanan stared up at him from the ground, his eyes wide. Shane said nothing. He had no need to; his eyes said it all. They were cold and desolate as the void and, staring into them, Buchanan was rendered speechless. He waved his hand slowly and indicated for the invigilators to stand down. They complied and Shane turned abruptly on the spot and walked away. He stalked back to the courthouse and went inside, where he went straight to his cell and slammed the door behind him.
Still lying in the dirt, Buchanan rubbed his aching jaw. ‘Welcome back, Shane,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

There was a gathering at O’Malley’s that night. Buchanan came to collect Shane a little before sundown and they crossed the street in silence.
Shane felt as if something had changed inside of him. Killing Devlin had been like a splash of cold water and it was as if he had woken from a deep sleep. The last six years felt like a bad dream. There was a sureness in his step and he walked with his head held high.
When they came to the saloon doors, Buchanan paused to let Shane go first. He strode in, ignoring the faces that turned to stare at him, and crossed straight to the bar; where he grabbed himself a bottle and a glass and moved on to find himself a table. This time, Buchanan let him go and did not move to join him.
Shane pulled up a seat alone with his back to the wall and pushed another chair out in front of him on which he propped his feet. He poured himself a drink and leaned back and studied the contestants who had made it into the next round.
They were all present, all except Chastity, and each sat with several tables between them and their nearest neighbour, filling the saloon even though there were only a handful of them. They were watched over by Nathaniel’s invigilators and the atmosphere was tense. Nobody spoke.
Several of the windows had been opened but inside it was still hot as Hell. Tobacco smoke drifted, mixing with the smell of liquor and sweat and the underlying scent of gunsmoke, mould and dry wood.
The woman, Vendetta, sat where she had sat the night before, one foot resting on the seat of her chair. Her hat had a noticeable hole in its crown. Evan Drager stretched his injured leg out in front of him. The Apache, Nanache, had a fresh finger bone hanging from his necklace.
Shane noticed that Kip Kutcher’s girlfriend, Madison, had come along. She sat way back in the shadows and looked to be keeping out of Tom Freeman’s way. Freeman, for his part, seemed uninterested in her. He sat with his back to the wall and was watching the other contestants discreetly, sizing them up.
The chalkboard on which Whisperer had scratched up everybody’s name stood propped against the wall as it had been last night. The names of the dead had been scratched off and from the empty spaces chalked up to the right of every match it was easy to deduce the pairings for the second round. The winner of the first match would face the winner of the second; the winner of the third would face the winner of the fourth, and so on. Matt Nesbitt was drinking heavily because of this, for his next opponent would be Chastity and he knew that he did not stand a chance.
Shane’s next fight would be against Valentino Rodrigues, the man who had killed the Gentleman. He would be a more difficult opponent than John Devlin had been but Shane was confident he would win. Shane drained his glass and poured himself another.
The doors opened and Nathaniel’s bodyguards entered, followed by the man himself, with Whisperer close behind. He was full of praise for the contestants. ‘I salute you all,’ he said. ‘Today’s round separated the wheat from the chaff. You have each of you shown the speed and the skill worthy of a true gunfighter. But that is not enough. Tomorrow we will divide you still.’
Whisperer walked past him and began chalking up the names on the board, confirming what everybody had already deduced about the second round’s pairings.
‘The first two matches tomorrow morning will take place at ten and eleven on the hour. Matt Nesbitt and Chastity to begin, followed by Vendetta and Nanache. The second two matches will be fought in the afternoon at one and two respectively. The pairings are . . .’
Shane had stopped listening. He had noticed that once again Nathaniel had avoided the Gunfighter’s Hour of twelve noon. He wondered why.
‘Those of you who succeed tomorrow,’ Nathaniel continued. ‘Will earn the chance to further distinguish yourselves in the semi-final. Those of you who do not will die as unremarkably as those who failed today. May the best of you prevail.’
He walked over and joined Buchanan at the bar. With the business of the meeting concluded, many of the contestants began to leave. Matt Nesbitt stayed where he was. Sullenly, he filled his glass back up to the brim and sat there staring at it.
Somebody walked over to Shane’s table. It was Nanache. ‘You shot well today,’ he said.
Shane smiled wryly to himself. ‘You want to add my fingers to your collection?’
‘If I could do that, I would not need my collection,’ the Apache said. He sat down opposite Shane. ‘You could have competed here before. I would like to know why you refused.’
‘And I’d like to know why you’re talking to me. I thought you hated white men.’
‘That is true, but you are no man.’ Nanache replied. ‘You are like he is,’ he said, and he nodded toward Whisperer.
Despite the heat, Shane suddenly felt cold. ‘And what’s he?’ he asked.
‘Devil-kind,’ Nanache replied. The word was familiar to Shane. ‘No longer of this world, not yet of the next.’

After all of the others had gone the only two people left in O’Malley’s were Matt Nesbitt and the girl, Madison. Both sat alone and in silence. Shane had been taken back to his cell, Nathaniel had returned to the Grande and the invigilators had gone back to their patrols.
The saloon lay mostly in darkness. A few lanterns burned, offering a dim source of light in places, but in others the shadows were deep. The place felt empty.
Nesbitt stared at his glassful of whisky. He had not touched it in more than half-an-hour, but simply sat and stared and thought about what would happen to him tomorrow. He thought about the death of Escoban Cadero and how the little girl, Chastity, had killed him before he had even had chance to draw his gun.
Matt Nesbitt did not want to die.
He did not look up when the girl came over and sat opposite him. For a long time they both sat in silence. Then the girl spoke. ‘Are you going to drink that?’ she asked.
Nesbitt thought hard on it for a while then leaned back in his chair and pushed the glass away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a clear head in the morning.’
The girl shrugged. She too had seen Chastity fight that morning and understood what Nesbitt was up against. ‘You’ll need more than that,’ she said doubtfully. She reached over and took his glass.
‘Finish it.’ Nesbitt told her, leaving her the bottle. He kicked back his chair and left the saloon.
Madison watched him go, wishing that he had stayed to keep her company. She stared at the glass for a moment, then downed it in one. The harsh liquor burned her throat but it felt good and she poured herself another and downed that one too. She had spent a good deal of her adult life in saloons and gambling dens and cheap hotels and Madison could handle her drink better than some men she knew. Kip had never been a very good drinker. After two shots the alcohol would go straight to his head and he’d start singing. She smiled. Kip had always got frisky when he was drunk and she remembered him fondly.
She had never meant for him to die, not like this.
Her eyes began to water with fresh tears and she rubbed them viciously. She did not want to cry any more. She had always thought herself tougher than that. Angrily, she poured herself another glass of whisky. She was clumsy and slopped a little bit onto the table. Behind her, she thought she heard someone laugh.
She called out: ‘Is somebody there?’
The darkness swallowed up her voice, muffling it. Madison could not see anybody else in the saloon with her but still she had a creeping sensation that she was being watched. She began to get uneasy and, snatching up the unfinished bottle, she hurried to the doorway.
She reached it just as the town began its nightly chorus. The wood beneath her feet groaned and the walls shuddered noisily. Madison started and ran outside, jumping off the boardwalk onto firm ground. All around her in every direction, every building was making the same noise, wood popping and cracking as if the whole town was about to fall down. She had heard it many times already but still it made her nervous and she headed out into the middle of the crossroads, where she thought she would be safe if anything did collapse.
From where she stood, the sound was even more creepy. She listened as it settled into rhythm, each individual building gradually falling into time with its neighbours until the sound rolled in towards her like a wave advancing up the shore, then turned and rolled back out again towards the desert.
In and out.
In and out.
The timing was as consistent as the ticking of a metronome and it moved through all four quarters of the town at the same pace. It was far too regular to be natural. Madison did not understand what caused it, but then there was a lot about Covenant she did not understand and more besides that she wished she had never found out about in the first place. Kip was dead and she wished that she had never insisted that he come here. Again fighting the urge to cry, she hurried down the street until she reached the house that she and Kip had claimed as their own.
The house had once belonged to a family with a little girl. Madison had found an old rag doll on the day they arrived and, though it was a little dusty, she had adopted it for her own. It was perched close to the bedroll that she and Kip had shared and she gathered it into her arms as she sat and swigged straight from the bottle of whisky.
Finally, she could hold off her sadness no longer and she broke down and cried.
When the messenger had brought Kip his invitation to compete, Kip had initially not wanted to attend. ‘It’ll just be a bunch of psychos, Maddy. No fun at all.’ Madison had known that really he was afraid that he would die, but that hadn’t bothered her at the time. She had only known Kip a few weeks and while he was fun to be with he was not as good a gunfighter as he liked to think he was, and Madison liked gunfighters. Proper ones.
She had figured that if Kip took her to Covenant then she would be able to replace him with somebody better, maybe even one of the Fastest Guns. He was only supposed to have been a temporary thing, a stepping stone. She had never expected to fall in love with him.
She slugged miserably from the bottle and wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve. She had never felt so wretched before in all her life and now she did not know what else to do with herself.
As she drank, she failed to notice the figure who stepped silently out of the darkness on the opposite side of the room. He was tall and wore a long, leather coat and a hat whose brim was pulled down low to cover his face in shadow. Pale, grey smoke rose from his body, smelling strongly of fulminate.
Madison did not notice. She had her back to him and was too wrapped up in her grief to hear him as he drew a long-barrelled revolver and thumbed back the hammer.
‘Wait.’
A second figure emerged from the shadows next to the first and closed a slender hand around his wrist, forcing him to lower his aim.
The first turned to the newcomer, questioningly.
‘We have made an accord.’ The second whispered, his voice like distant gunfire. ‘No one is to die. Yet,’ he added.
Unobserved, both figures melted back into the darkness.

They were the six most powerful men in Wainsford: a banker, traders, a rancher and two lawyers; the men who ruled the town, who influenced, shaped it, milked and bled it dry. They were the six members of the town council and Shane had not been entirely surprised when they had asked to speak with him. He only wondered that it had taken them so long.
‘It would only be a temporary arrangement, you understand?’
Shane said nothing. The six men were all used to getting what they wanted and it showed. All wore power suits, gold watches and polished shoes. All, that was, except for the lawyer, Boyd, who did not care what other people thought of him and wore an ill-fitting suit, stained and mildewed, his hair unstyled, greasy and unkempt. He smelled of stale sweat and tobacco and cheap gin.
The six men were confident, domineering, and Shane took great pleasure in unnerving them with his dead-eyed stare until the point that even Reynolds, the fat rancher, shifted uncomfortably on the edge of his chair.
It was Boyd who was doing most of the talking. ‘You’ll be paid five-hundred dollars,’ he said. ‘How you do it is up to you but we want Fletcher out before the end of the week. This situation has gone on quite long enough.’
Earlier that morning, as Shane and Buchanan had talked on the boardwalk, the town council had gone to the jailhouse and formally terminated Fletcher’s employment as town marshal. ‘You’ve been neglecting your duties,’ Boyd had told him, speaking to the locked jailhouse door. ‘This town is overrun and instead of protecting us you’re holed up like a coward. This is unacceptable.’
Since only the town marshal was supposed to use the jailhouse, they had demanded that Fletcher and his men vacate it immediately, to which Fletcher had replied in no uncertain terms. After a lengthy argument he had eventually flung his marshal’s badge out the window and it now rested in the palm of Shane’s hand, where Boyd had put it.
Shane did not know if the councilmen were just trying to preserve their interests in the town or if somebody more powerful had wired them before the telegraph lines had been cut, but they had not hired him to get rid of the bounty hunters in town; they had asked him to get rid of Fletcher, Ben and Alan Grant, and in so doing had effectively given him a free hand to do what he liked with Hunte.
Hunte’s name had not been mentioned once in all of the discussion and it was clear that the councilmen wanted no complicity in whatever became of him. If there were any repercussions for what happened in town then Shane had no doubt that they would hang him out to dry. He expected no less, but that didn’t mean he had to play by their rules. ‘I want to be sworn in,’ he said. ‘In front of witnesses. The hotel manager and his wife will do. And I want my contract in writing.’
The banker, Patterson, was not keen. ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ he said evasively.
‘Hunte’s wanted in front of a Congressional Committee. If he dies because of this, I’m not having my head put on the block.’
Boyd was slick. ‘We’ll swear you in,’ he agreed. ‘And have everything done up in writing. Effective immediately, you will be marshal.’
‘And I want a deputy.’ Shane said.
Boyd’s face twitched in irritation. ‘I’m not sure we can find–’
‘I already have someone in mind.’
‘Fine.’ Patterson said. ‘Employ him. But you’ll have to pay him out of your own pocket.’
‘Yes. About the money,’ Shane said, turning to face him with his dead-eyed stare. ‘It’s not enough.’
In truth, the money was fine; Shane just enjoyed fucking with them.