Little Heaven

1

THE ENGLISHMAN’S CAR was in atrocious shape, but he had been tasked with killing a man that day, that very day without delay, if possible, so there was nothing to be done about it—the car and its driver would both have to cope.

He had stolen the car, a Ford Galaxie 500 with red leatherette upholstery and faux-marble door panels, from a traveling salesman working the southern territory. The salesman picked the Englishman up on the side of the road, where he’d been thumbing a ride. After a half hour of polite chit-chat, the Englishman drew a pistol and ordered the man to pull over and get out.

“But,” the salesman sputtered, “I did you a favor, for God’s sake!”

The Englishman said: “Yes, and that’s irony for you, chum.”

“I didn’t have to, you know,” the salesman said, getting out of the car. “A lot of people wouldn’t pick up a man of your coloration.”

“You are a gentleman and a prince,” said the Englishman, and drove away.

The salesman trafficked in encyclopedias. The trunk was packed with them. The Englishman stopped and tossed them into the weeds. After a hard afternoon’s driving, the car developed a persistent knock. The Englishman drove on and a few hours later ran over some debris strewn across the road that tore the fender molding half off. The loosened metal flapped against the frame, which, in addition to the engine knock, created a din that he could not alleviate even by cranking the radio up and blasting “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes.

He tried to ignore it and focus on the task at hand. He had been hired for a ticklish bit of work by a man named Seaborn Appleton. He had made Appleton’s acquaintance following another bit of business he had done for his primary employer, who would remain nameless. Said business involved killing one Mortimer “Bladder” Knipple of Marfa, Texas, who had stabbed a man in a drunken fracas. The dead man happened to be kin to the Englishman’s employer. Restitutions needed to be made, and such debts could be paid only in blood.

The Englishman discovered Knipple brandy-drunk in a flophouse outside of Wimberley, where Knipple pulled the same dagger he’d used to kill the other man. The Englishman’s employer would have preferred Knipple be delivered alive—and if he had been, his sufferings would have been legendary—but as the Englishman had no inclination to tussle with a stabby drunk, he shot Knipple in the brain with a silenced pistol and took a Polaroid of the corpse.

When he telephoned his employer to say the job had been done, he was given Seaborn Appleton’s contact details with the assurance that any job would net a handsome payout. He called Appleton. Appleton spoke a name. It was a name the Englishman was acquainted with, in the way a territorial wrestler is familiar with the work of a man toiling in another region. The name sent the slightest twinge up the Englishman’s spine, which was a sensation he had not felt in years. He didn’t mind it at all. It told him he was alive.

It was that man the Englishman was presently making fast to murder. But again, there was the small matter of the car. It was shaking to pieces. There was a plastic hula dancer on the car’s dashboard; its hips swayed with every shake and judder. That dancer was crass, like so much of Americana. The Englishman occasionally missed the stolidity of his home country here in the land of neon and silver lamé and velvet Elvis paintings. That garishness sat against both the Englishman’s temperament and his adopted appearance—he favored well-cut suits and snappy hats, and wore his hair long and straight with the aid of a relaxing solution.

He ripped the dancer off the dash—the suction cup came free with a loud pok!—and tossed it out the window. His mind returned to the small matter of killing a man.

The Englishman was so preoccupied with the matters of the car, the man, and that man’s death that he took no notice of the person hopping antsily from foot to foot at the traffic light where he had stopped. The Englishman had needed to pull off the freeway into a sleepy burg in order to fill the tank. It was night by that point, the streets deserted save for this lone person—a man hopping about as if beset by the dire need to piss. So preoccupied was the Englishman that he didn’t even see the man snake up to the car. He took notice only when the man stuck his arm through the open window. At the end of that arm was a rusted pistol that looked to have been salvaged from a lake.

The man holding it had the skin of a decaying apple. His eyelids fluttered with some kind of sickness. Rusted or not, the gun looked powerful enough to tear the stranger’s stringy arm off if he elected to pull the trigger.

The Englishman reached to one side. The man waggled his gun in warning.

“You want money, I’m guessing?”

“That’s right,” said the man, breathing his mouth stench onto the Englishman. “You’s pretty smart, ain’t ya?”

“Bright as a penny, old chap.”

The man licked his lips, cracked and salt-whitened. “You talk stupid.”

The Englishman retrieved his wallet, fat with bills—he did not believe in banks, or of records of any sort—and handed it out the window. The man was so taken with the wallet’s plumpness that he did not see the Englishman reach for his own weapon, a silenced Colt 1903 that lay beneath a folded copy of the Hobbs Daily News-Sun on the passenger seat.

The Englishman shot the stringy fellow through the car door. There came a sharp report as a slug drove through one-sixteenth of an inch of Detroit rolling iron. A hole sprouted as if by magic in the man’s belly. He fell onto the street, shrieking and clawing at his stomach.

“Give me back my billfold,” the Englishman said calmly.

“You shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh—!”

“Shot you. Yes, I did. The wallet, man. Give it to me now, or I will put the next one in your wrinkly bollocks.”

The man’s face twisted in agonized incomprehension.

“Your balls, sir. Your oysters. Again, and for a final time, the wallet.”

The man managed to scrape it up and, groaning, blood pissing through the hole in his gut, handed it through the window. The Englishman glanced in the rearview mirror, saw nobody had witnessed the event, and tipped an imaginary cap to the man he’d shot.

“Heigh-ho.”

“I need a doctor!” the man wailed.

The Englishman said, “You’ll need an embalmer.”

The man sat on the street. Blood burped from the hole in his stomach. His mouth hung open in horror, spittle foaming on his lips.

“I suggest you crawl to the nearest clinic,” said the Englishman. “Or wait it out where you’re sitting. Either way, it oughtn’t take long.”

THREE HOURS LATER, the Englishman piloted the car up a hill that crested onto a plateau staggered with bur oaks. To the west lay the razor-backed peaks of the Mogollon Range. The San Francisco River valley spread out beneath him. The lights of Mogollon township glittered in the new dawn.

2

MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE had come to Mogollon to kill a man.

Seaborn Appleton was that man’s name. The Chemist, as he was otherwise known. Einstein with a chemistry set. Appleton created acid that could rip your scalp off and fill your brain with fanciful visions. Supercharged PCP that would keep you high a full day. Wild and wonderful stuff that had the dope fiends, speed freaks, and needle jockeys lining up down the block for a taste.

Appleton had acquired Micah for protection. Appleton did not maintain a home base. He preferred the life of the traveling snake oil salesman. Appleton went from town to town in a VW camper van, peddling his wares. It seemed a perverse way to live, but upon scrutiny it made sense. The supplies he required were often available only with a prescription, so they had to be procured from pharmacies and hospitals—at night, after hours, with the help of a lockpick set. Following these thefts, those places adopted better security measures. Then it was time to move on to another town.

Seaborn Appleton was also a suspicious sort. A paranoiac, you might even say. He’d adopted perpetual motion as a lifestyle—his enemies, of which he was convinced there were many, would find it harder to zero in on a moving target.

Part of Micah Shughrue’s job was to drive the VW camper from town to town while Appleton dozed fitfully on the foldout cot, occasionally screaming out as if in pain. Micah drove in silence at Appleton’s behest—no radio, only the musical tinkle of Appleton’s powders and liquids, all housed in glass bottles, rattling in the back.

Appleton preferred to sell directly to his clientele. Most drug lords—and Appleton was that, if one of minor regard—usually tasked low-level flunkies with the selling. Who wanted to deal with the scabby-faced, buttery-skinned addicts themselves? Who wanted to confront the physical manifestation of the poison they profited from? But Appleton got a kick out of it. He enjoyed the craven need in all those twitching, bloodshot eyes.

Appleton himself was a dour, funereal, and jarringly skeletal man. But put him in front of a gaggle of crankers, and his limbs loosened, his dourness receded, and his voice took on the rich, plaintive tones of a lay preacher.

“Ooooh, yes,” he’d say, displaying his newest wares. “You will be astonished, my pretties. This magical stuff will take you places you never dreamed existed.”

By the time Micah joined him, Appleton was beloved by the addicts of the towns he cycled through. They would catch wind of his arrival and do everything short of roll out a welcome mat. When it was time to move on, they practically clawed onto the bumper of his van, wailing at him to take them with him. For Micah, the work was easy. There were the expected scuffles. Jittery addicts brandishing box cutters, demanding money or product. An upstart rival asserting claim over a territory that had been the Chemist’s for years—but Appleton had let it go with a shrug. “This country is too vast, and too full of paying customers, to go to war over one tiny patch of it,” he’d said. For eight months, Micah kept Appleton from bodily harm, and was compensated handsomely for his efforts.

Then Micah met a woman. They had been looping back down into Oregon at the time, plying their trade in familiar ports of call. The woman showed up at the abandoned soap factory where Appleton was entertaining clientele. She was carrying something.

Micah approached carefully, measuring her intentions, one hand on the butt of his pistol. Maybe she was carrying a gun—in his experience, sometimes the direst threat came in the most unlikely package. He roughly caught her arm.

“Show me,” he said.

The woman twisted painfully to reveal her sleeping infant daughter, partly swaddled in a grubby fleece blanket. The baby’s arms… well, that was the trouble. The little girl had no arms. Only a pair of melted nubs like amputation remnants jutting from her shoulders.

“She was born this way,” the woman said quietly. “And blind, too.”

“I am… sorry.” Micah didn’t know what else to say.

“It was the drugs that did it.” She looked wretched, cored out by grief. “I shouldn’t have taken them with her in my belly, but I was weak.”

The babe awoke and began to mewl. Its eyes were a featureless gray, as if molten pewter had been poured into the sockets.

“Would you shut that up?” Appleton called over. “It’s ruining my mood.”

After the last bug-eyed scrounger had left, Micah detailed this encounter to Appleton while they sat inside the van. Appleton’s response was in keeping with his nature.

“I sell drugs, man! Drugs hurt people. They hurt the trembling lives inside those people, too. They also make people feel wondrous and let them escape the horror of their inept, ridiculous existence for a while. I can’t be responsible. I won’t be!”

On the most basic level, Micah understood Appleton’s point. People were responsible for their own lives. But still, he couldn’t shake the sight of that tot.

“From what depths of soul do you dredge up this moral outrage, anyway?” Appleton said with a mocking laugh. “You’ve probably killed more men than my products ever will. Why else would I have hired you?”

“Not women, not children, not the unborn.”

Appleton shrugged. “It’s settled, then. We’re both killers.”

“Most every man I have ever killed was trying to do the same to me at the time.”

“That infant isn’t dead,” Appleton said petulantly. “She will simply have more challenges to face than other youngsters.”

Something snapped inside Micah right then. It happened from time to time, often without warning. He couldn’t help it and didn’t even try to—it came as a release of all that pent-up pressure.

Micah stepped outside the van. He grabbed a box of the Chemist’s newest, dandiest product and hurled it onto the cement of the soapworks. He set about stomping on it, grinding the bluish powder into the oily floor, reducing it to worthless paste.

“What are you—?” Appleton cried. “You cocksucking sonofawhoooore!”

Micah kept at it, laughing like a satyr. So intense was his rage that he did not notice Appleton reach under his cot for a small-bore pistol, which he quickly fired.

The slug hit Micah under the armpit, both his arms being raised in a gleeful jig. He was thrown down and the wind knocked out of him. He reached for his gun, but Appleton was already behind the wheel. He fired the van up and tore out of the soapworks, leaving Micah on the floor with the silvery tang of the crushed drug sharp in his nose.

He lay bleeding for several minutes. He thought: It is always the goddamn amateurs who score the luckiest hits. He stood and staggered five long blocks to a pay phone. He could not call a hospital. They would fix him up, but they would also send for the police. So he called a veterinarian, a man who owed Micah a favor. The vet arrived some time later to find Micah passed out in an alley not far from the phone booth.

The vet drove Micah to his office. He dug the bullet out and inserted a stent into Micah’s chest to vent the blood. For many days, Micah lay in the garden shed out behind the vet’s house with that stent jabbing out of him; he twisted a spigot to drain his own blood. He coughed up pints of blood, dark and thick as pancake batter, and descended into hallucinations.

Once he healed, he embarked upon a relentless pursuit of Seaborn Appleton, who was by then miles away in the company of new henchmen. Micah shot two of those new men in a cathouse in Elko, Nevada, but Appleton escaped with his third hired gun. After that, Micah caught wind that Appleton had put out a call for harder men—professional mercenaries, ex-military—and put a bounty on his former protector’s head.

Undeterred, Micah headed to Mogollon. He suspected it would be the bastard’s next stop, following his migratory pattern.

And when Appleton arrived, Micah Shughrue would kill him dead and that would be that.

3

MINERVA ATWATER had come to Mogollon to kill two men.

Her contract called for only one individual, a man named Micah Henry Shughrue. A veteran of the Korean War who had spent the ensuing years on the shadow side of the law. A gun for hire. A merc. Of late, he’d been loosely associated with a criminal enterprise operating out of Kansas City. He wasn’t a member of that particular outfit—more of a stringer. Five years ago, he’d been set upon by Deputy US Marshal Clint Smith, who rousted him in the bathtub of a Topeka whorehouse; Micah Shughrue shot Smith in the leg with a zip gun stashed under the towel folded neatly next to the tub and alighted on foot, running down the street and into the Topeka gorge naked as a jay. Evidently he’d survived. Shughrue seemed to be that, if nothing else. A survivor.

Micah Shughrue. By many accounts, the nastiest goddamn sonofabitch walking this earth. He was the first man she would kill.

The second man was a foreigner. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. An assassin. Remorseless, dead-eyed, black-skinned. Talked with a funny accent. Wore a fancy suit, fancy hat, grew his hair long like a woman. Carried pearl-handled pistols and, it was said, could knock the wings off a bumblebee’s back with either hand. His shadow was the last thing you saw before your brains fanned out the front of your skull.

He was the second man she would kill. Though in truth, the exact order was not so important.

Minerva had no contract for the Englishman. In point of fact, both Minerva and the Englishman had been hired by the same man: Seaborn Appleton. Both for the same task, killing Micah Henry Shughrue.

“The man has gone feral,” was how Appleton phrased it to her. “I knew of Shughrue’s past misdeeds, but he was valuable to me. Yet in time, he was once again given over to wickedness.”

Appleton had repelled Minerva at first glance. A jangly skeleton draped in cheap seersucker with a face like a dime’s worth of dog meat. She boggled at his success in the pharmacology trade; the only thing she’d ever buy from Appleton would be a sack, which she would slip over his head so as to spare herself the sight of his puckered bunghole of a mouth and his snake handler’s eyes. But a job was a job, and Appleton was paying cash on the barrelhead. As well he ought to, considering the man he was asking her to snuff.

“Why the two of us?” she asked.

“Insurance, my dear. If the Englishman fails, you will finish it. Or the other way round, as may happen.”

“I don’t need his damn help.”

“Oh yes, and he doesn’t need yours. But who can say? Mr. Shughrue is a very… ah, he is a man to whom completeness is key.”

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean he is a completist, my dear. He holds the most fastidious sense of it. A thing is only done once Micah Shughrue has rendered it so, and it is he alone who concludes when those ends have been met. He is a finisher, in all. A more scrupulous sense of finality than any man I have ever met.”

The poached eggs of Appleton’s eyes quivered fearfully. Minerva found yet another reason to be revolted by him.

“He’s just a man,” she said. “A bullet will end him, same as anyone else.”

Appleton didn’t seem so sure. What did he think this Shughrue was, some deathless devil?

Appleton said, “How many men have you killed?”

“Enough,” said Minerva.

“Don’t lie to me. How many?”

Minerva cut her gaze at Appleton—her pale eyes were ringed with gold, but were not yet those of a killer. She had hurt men, quite badly in fact, but… it was not that she was chicken-gutted. It was simply that the opportunity had not presented itself. She was a bounty hunter. The men she’d pursued to that point were meek creatures: debt shirkers, those on the scamper from their creditors. One of them had come at Minerva with a knife; she’d busted his knee with a length of stovewood. She’d peppered another one’s buttocks with wolf shot when he tried to flee. And she’d crippled a bookie named Thelonious Skell for nonbusiness reasons.

But kill a man? End his life? No, not yet. But she was good and ready.

“I’ve killed three men,” she lied.

“And did they die quickly?”

“Slower than they would have liked.”

“You’ll want to finish Shughrue fast,” said Appleton. “As quick as you can pull the trigger. ’Cause he won’t stop until he’s killed you. And depending on his mood, which is poor at the best of times, he might move on to your mother, your father, and your children.”

“Do I look like a mother to you?” she said.

After wrapping affairs with Appleton, Minerva retired to her fleabag motel. It was a day’s drive to Mogollon. Appleton intended to delay his arrival there to ensure that Shughrue—whom Appleton could feel breathing down his neck—would show up the day before. Minerva and the Englishman would also come that same day. All things being proper, Micah Shughrue would be dead by the time Appleton’s VW van crossed the town line.

“Maybe you and the Englishman can work together?” Appleton had suggested.

Minerva demurred. More precisely, she’d said: “I’d rather fall off the roof of a whorehouse and catch my eyelid on a nail.”

She had plans for both men.

Micah Shughrue was all business.

The Englishman? That was entirely personal.

4

MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE encountered the Englishman in Trotter’s Stables at the end of Mogollon’s ramshackle main street around midmorning.

Mogollon was a scratch-ass town of less than two thousand souls. It was afflicted with the same leprosy as a lot of these decaying New Mexico boomtowns. A century ago, men had descended upon the area to pan for gold and silver. Claptrap camps went up to service the prospectors—saloons with faro tables, brothels, joints where men spent the gold dust sieved out of the rivers. But nobody was really from a place like Mogollon, and when the gold dried up, towns like it mostly emptied out. Now all that remained was a shell, hollowed out, populated by those too stupid or lazy to move someplace better.

Micah had taken a room at the Two Points, the only motel in town. He did not sleep, but even on a normal night, Micah slept only a few hours. He had flicked on the black-and-white Zenith and watched until the Indian’s head came on and the words beneath it read: Your Local News at 7 AM! When dawn broke over the swaybacked roofs of Mogollon, he dressed in fresh clothes and holstered his pistol inconspicuously and made his way to a coffeehouse that was just opening. He drank bad coffee and ate a honey bun that tasted too much like the Camels the man behind the counter smoked, but still, he ate another as he read a big-city newspaper cover to cover. He scanned the street every so often. The town awoke sluggishly; nobody seemed to have much to do or any intensity about them.

He spotted a man walking down the opposite sidewalk in the direction of the horse stables. Micah had heard about a black pistolman with long ladylike hair and English manners. The exact sort of man Appleton might have hired.

Micah ordered another coffee to go and carried his paper cup out onto the street. He tucked his body behind a wooden column propping up the veranda and watched the black man disappear into the stables. He crossed the street and tossed his coffee cup behind a shrub. The street was thinly trafficked, only a mother pushing a stroller down the opposite sidewalk.

Micah unholstered his gun and eased around the open stable door. It was dim; feathery shafts of sunlight slipped through the wooden slats, picking up a patina of dust. The air smelled of hay and of horseflesh. The Englishman was bent at the feet of a horse. He seemed to be examining a malady on its hoof. He made a sweet clicking noise that came from deep in his throat. Micah slipped behind another horse ten feet away from the man.

“Hello,” he said.

At first, the Englishman remained bent at the horse’s feet, its hoof clasped in his hands. Then he shook his head in a slow side-to-side as if chastising himself. When he stood and turned, his own pistol was drawn. He was met by the sight of Micah, the majority of his body—his center of mass, as a rifle instructor would say—shielded by a dappled roan. Micah was aiming his Colt at the man from under the horse’s belly.

“Ahem,” said the man, “you’ve put me in a spot, old bean.”

It was him. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. And he was right: all he had was a tricky shot at Micah’s head or his legs. Micah had the Englishman’s whole body to hit.

Of course, Micah knew that the Englishman must have already considered simply shooting the horse. But the bullets would craze through the beast’s heavy vitals, or be flattened on its bones. A gut-shot horse would buck and fuss, giving the Englishman an opportunity, but there was a much better chance that Micah would irrigate his opponent’s chest well before that.

Micah said, “I have never met a black man with straight hair. How do you do it?”

“Relaxer,” the Englishman said. “Enough to float a coal ship.”

The horse’s cock slipped from its sheath. Micah could not see its entire length due to his positioning, but what he glimpsed put him in the mind of a thick rubber hose. Not quite a fireman’s hose, girthwise, but not far off. Micah angled his gun away from the horse’s comically large member. He did not want to accidentally blow a hole through it.

“I will not lie,” the Englishman said, looking at it. “I feel unmanned. It’s not good to feel that way before a gunfight.”

“It is an animal. Our anatomies do not square up.”

“You make a good point. And yet—”

The horse pissed. Long and loud and luxurious. Droplets of urine splashed up to wet Micah’s trousers.

“My God,” the Englishman marveled. “Do you think it’s been given a diuretic?”

The horse finished. It shook contentedly and began to eat hay. This interlude having concluded, the men returned to their own business.

Micah said, “I take it Appleton hired you?”

“He did. He claims you killed two of his men.”

“I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.”

“Bully for you.”

“And you?”

The Englishman said, “I hunt people for money. I imagine most of them have been bad eggs, but I never bothered to read their diaries.”

Bold was the man who could joke with a pistol pointed at his belly.

“It’s a job to me, nothing more,” the Englishman went on. “But according to Appleton, you’ve been asking for it.”

“Who of us is not asking for it?”

“So then, why not let it go?”

“Appleton dealt me a bad turn,” Micah said simply. “I will not be done wrong.”

“Ah. You’re one of those.”

Micah set his jaw. The Englishman did not know about the baby with no arms. Micah had dreamed about that child. She was the reason, more or less, why he had to kill Appleton. He could even set aside Appleton’s treachery in dry-gulching him. That was business. But Micah hoped he’d sleep better with Appleton gone.

For this reason, he did not wish to shoot the Englishman. Not because he was scared of the man’s skills. The Englishman was a trained killer, but Micah had his own abilities in that area. He was not anxious about taking out the Englishman on moral grounds, either—he had murdered for lesser cause, sadly.

No, Micah didn’t want to fire on the Englishman because something might occur during the course of events to stop him from finishing what he’d come to Mogollon to do, that being to kill Seaborn Appleton. Kill him for that little baby with no arms.

Such was Micah’s mind-set when a woman rushed into the stable with two pistols drawn and firing.

For a split second, Micah assumed she was an apparition. He used to have similar visions when drunk, though in those, the woman was stepping naked out of a lake or naked into a bedroom—in any event, naked. But this woman was clothed in a duster the color of old fingernails and alligator-skin boots. She carried a pair of Colts that kicked skyward as she squeezed the triggers.

The stabled horses reared at the deafening gunshots. The roan slammed into Micah, knocking the wind out of him. His gun fell to the dirt. He saw the Englishman catch a slug through his shoulder. It reeled him in a sloppy pirouette. Micah grunted and knelt for his gun, spinning toward the woman—a girl, really—to return fire as the horses stampeded out the stable doors. His bullet struck a post near her head, spraying splinters. She flinched at the flying wood and fired ploddingly from the hip.

Minerva couldn’t have hoped for better luck. She had been sitting in her car scoping the main drag when, at precisely ten o’clock, she’d spotted the English twit. At two past ten, Micah Shughrue followed the British fuck into the stable. Two bugs in the kill jar. She had a mind to let them shoot each other dead, but that would not satisfy her. She had to flatline the Englishman. He would have to die first; he struck her as the sharper shot. Once he was dead, or at least down, she could focus on Shughrue.

But things began to spin out of control the moment she stepped into the stables. She’d intended to surprise them. Unsporting? Granted. But she needed every advantage against such experienced gunmen. Minerva expected to take return fire. She might even be hit. But she could withstand that, she figured.

This belief had persisted up until the moment the bullets began to sing through the air. When she charged into the stables, everything sped up. She pulled the triggers and could feel the Colts’ hammers cocking back as the springs compressed. She could even feel the firing pins strike the flash holes, igniting the powder in each round. But her own movements were lethargic—her veins running with molasses, her arms leaden.

Oh Christ oh Christ, she thought. This is happening too goddamn fast—

Micah Shughrue saw this woman coming and he did not blink. He thumbed the hammer of his own Colt and put his first shot into the Englishman’s side. Gray smoke mushroomed from the barrel; the Englishman’s tailored shirt blew inward, then out again as the bullet jolted through his innards. Turning then, his mind clear and his breath quickening, Micah fired at the woman, whom he assumed to be the Englishman’s partner despite the fact that she was firing at the Englishman, determinedly so, her lips skinned from her teeth. His bullet winged her left leg down at the calf. She continued to advance, teeth bared and wolfish, her Colts thundering.

In the midst of all this, the Englishman sat confused. A rare inertia gripped his mind. Such sudden violence when he had been anticipating a gentlemanly tête-à-tête, followed by him dispatching Micah Shughrue and collecting Appleton’s reward. But then… this harridan. An appalling harpy with murder on her mind. At once he had been winged; moments later, he was hit again, this time by Shughrue. Only then did he pull his pistol and take aim at the murderess. A bullet whizzed past his skull, making the sound of an angry hornet. One of his own bullets struck her. She collapsed behind the water trough…

Minerva crumpled behind the trough, clutching her belly. It felt as if she’d been kicked by a donkey, and yet there was no real pain—only the sudden and somehow blunt force of impact. The fact blitzed through her brainpan: I’ve been hit! She’d never been shot before. So this was how it felt. She had expected worse. All she sensed was a cold disconnect between her chest and legs, like a bunch of threads had been cut.

Miraculously, Micah Shughrue was unhurt. The Englishman had eaten considerable lead, and the woman, too. Micah could see the black man on his back with blood running out of his shirt. A fine layer of dust and hay was stuck to his face.

“Oh,” the Englishman said. “Gents, I am killed.”

“I’m sorry for shooting you like that,” Micah said to him. “It was not my intent.”

Micah approached the trough. The woman lay behind it, grasping her side and retching. He turned back to see the Englishman sitting up. Too late, he noticed the dainty derringer clutched in his hand—

The lead ball struck Micah in the left eye. He fell straight back. A fine mist of blood hung in the air. He knew nothing else.

5

MICAH AWOKE BLIND.

He sat up with a jolt. Where was he? His final memory: the Englishman’s bullet snapping his skull back, followed by a terrible squelch inside his head.

He lay on a threadbare mattress, or so it felt. He could tell he was naked save for a pair of underwear.

Sightless.

An icy thread of fear spun around his heart. What goddamn use was a blind gunman? Forget killing Appleton—if he was blind, he could be killed by a child. A beggar could sneak up and slit his throat.

His fingers spidered up his chest, his face… he felt the bandages wound over his eyes. He unraveled them. Oh, thank Christ. He could see. He blinked. His view improved. He was in a makeshift infirmary. White privacy curtains were draped around his bed. He ran his fingertips around his right eye socket, the eye he could see out of. His fingers investigated the left eye next, figuring that the eyelid was gummed shut with blood or was otherwise occluded—

His index finger pushed past the sagging lids and into the sticky vault where his eye had recently resided. His fingertip grazed the raw flesh at the back where the nerves collected. He gasped.

“Christ, careful what you’re doing!”

A man had stepped through the curtains. He wore a much-bloodied shirt and a hat with a beaten crown. Needles of sweaty hair protruded under its wide brim.

“Quit poking at it. It’ll get infected, turn to sepsis. And you see, I can’t very well amputate your head. That would be what you call a terminal decision.”

“You a doctor?” said Micah.

“Who the hell else would I be? Who else goes around fixing shot-up morons?”

“You took the eye?”

The doctor nodded. “I took the eye.”

Both men were silent a spell.

“It does not hurt,” said Micah. “It… tingles.”

“I flushed the socket with a numbing agent and gave you a shot for the pain. But you’ll feel it soon enough. It won’t be pleasant.”

“Did you have to take my eye, Doc?”

The doctor removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. His hands were stained with blood the way a mechanic’s hands can get with axle grease—the skin takes on the tincture of the substance that he works with all day.

“I am no surgeon. I administer to the men and women around here, most of them farmers or ranchers. If a hand gets crushed and we can’t get them to the hospital two towns over, I take it off. A foot mangled, off it comes. Better to lose a limb than die of septic shock.” He reseated his hat. “Your eye was obliterated, Mr. Shughrue—yes, I know who you are. The bullet glanced off your ocular ridge—the bone, I mean to say—and dodged around inside the socket. A lucky break; otherwise it would have passed through into your brain. Then all you’d be good for is drooling.”

“How did you remove it?”

“You really want to know?”

“Tell me.”

“A tool called a curette,” the doctor said. “A sharpened spoon, pretty much. I scooped it out, snipped the nerve. The eye was smashed fruit. Useless even as a decoration.”

The doctor possessed little in the way of bedside manner, but Micah was grateful for his candor.

“You could be fitted for a fake one, Mr. Shughrue. Or a patch.”

“Maybe I will keep it the way it is,” said Micah, filled with momentary despair. “Or have a flagpole jut out of it with a little flag at the end, the Stars and Stripes like the kids wave at parades.”

“It would be patriotic of you,” the doctor said dryly.

Micah pulled his knees to his chest. He was sore but otherwise unhurt. “The black fellow?”

The doctor said, “He’ll pull through. He was shot through the hip and shoulder. No organ damage.”

“Where is he?”

The doctor gestured to the other side of the curtains. Micah craned his head toward the bedpost, where he always hung his pistols—

“They’ve been confiscated,” the doctor said, sensing the intent. “The other fella’s, too. Now, you could get up and try choking him to death, but I’d tell the deputy stationed outside and he’d shoot you dead.”

“I will stay here, then.”

“That’s a good boy.”

“The woman?”

“She’s here also,” the doctor told him. “She’s hurt. She won’t be bothering anyone.”

“Who is she?”

“A bounty hunter, I’m told.” A chuckle. “Not worth a damn at her job, though, is she?”

Micah leaned back in bed. “So?”

“You’ll all live. You will all go to jail. You and the black man for the rest of your natural lives. The woman might get out just in time to start collecting Social Security. From what I gather, you have dodged the law a long time, Mr. Shughrue. Now you’re going to have to pay the ferryman.” He shrugged. “I hear tell you might even get the electric chair.”

“So why recommend a fake eye for me? It will just melt out of my head!” Micah laughed until a tear came out of his good eye. Something might have squirted out of his empty socket, too, but he couldn’t tell. “Hell of a thing, Doc. Healing me up so I can be fried.”

The doctor allowed himself a small smile in acknowledgment of how ludicrous his task must seem. He then drew liquid morphine into a syringe. “I’ll give you this so you can sleep.”

“But Doctor, is it habit-forming?”

The sawbones chortled at this. He administered the shot and squared his hat to Micah. “Get some rest.”

6

MICAH AWOKE THAT NIGHT to the Englishman’s voice.

“Ho! You awake over there?”

Micah waited until his eyes—his eye—adjusted to the darkness. “I am up. What the hell do you want?”

“Are you mobile?” the Englishman asked.

“I can get around.”

“Wunderbar. I, however, am confined to bed rest.”

Micah sat up. A needle was jabbed into his forearm, feeding some manner of medical mixture into his veins. The needle ran to a tube, which in turn ran to a glass bottle hooked to an IV pole on casters.

Micah shuffled through the curtains; the casters squeaked as the pole rolled along. The world felt strange with only one eye. It was as if Micah’s body had already accepted that the eye was gone and was in the process of reorganizing itself to account for its loss.

The Englishman lay in a hospital bed, his head slightly raised, his long dark tresses fanned over the pillow—the ends were frizzing, reverting to their natural state.

“You got me,” he said.

“I apologized for that already,” said Micah.

“Really? I can’t recall. In any case, you shouldn’t. Pistols were drawn, yes? I would have done the same to you were it not for that madwoman.”

“You did her wrong?”

The Englishman frowned. “I’ve never laid eyes on that batty witch.”

Micah said, “You do the things men like us do, you are bound to have enemies you have never set eyes on.”

Micah could get a better sense of their location from here. They were in a makeshift ward. The woman was behind another set of curtains to the left; he could hear her deep, sleep-thick breathing. A small window gave a view of Mogollon’s main drag. He saw the brim of a man’s behatted head at the lowest edge of the window frame. The hat of a New Mexico police officer, who he assumed was standing watch. When he and the Englishman and the woman had sufficiently healed, he imagined they would be transported to a more secure location.

The Englishman wriggled his head into the pillow. “What did that doctor shoot into me? Lovely stuff.”

“The doc has cooked you on it.”

He nodded dopily. “Oh yes, I am well pickled.”

“You seem okay.”

“A few gobbets of flesh missing here and there, but I feel jim… dandy.” The Englishman hummed the refrain to “Polly Wolly Doodle,” then stopped. “You were very cool in the heat of it. Your hand did not tremble.”

“I have been there before” was all Micah could say.

“Korea?” Off Micah’s nod, the Englishman said, “Me as well. Royal Marines. The 1181st. First boots on the ground. Silent as death.”

“You must have been young.”

“Oh yes. A wee stripling. But I found I had an aptitude for it. Killing, I mean. It didn’t trouble me. I woke up screaming in the trenches sometimes, yes, but not half so much as the other lads. It is horrible to have a talent for something so dreadful, but there you have it.”

Micah nodded. They were both good at the same damned thing.

“They gave me a dishonorable discharge for knobbing my CO and breaking his nose,” the Englishman continued. “He deserved it, I assure you. After that, I came here. There was nothing for me back home. The marines turned me into an agent of chaos, yes? A piranha set loose in a goldfish tank. I was not fit for polite society. But here I found a heightened need for a man with my particular skills. The land of the free and the home of the brave. Your country is still so… unformed. Even now. And that lack of form creates pockets for me to ply my trade.”

“You were cool in the cut, too,” said Micah. He did not exactly mean it as a compliment.

“Hm.”

The men kept their peace. In time, the Englishman spoke. “The doctor took your eye?”

“He took it.”

“Well then, I am sorry.”

Micah said, “They will put us in prison. Give us the electric chair.”

“Hmmmm.”

“They took our pistols.”

“Hmmmm.”

Faintly, the woman’s breathing carried over the curtain.

“We are still in Mogollon,” Micah said. “On the main strip.”

“Near the stable?”

“Near enough.”

“We could take those horses,” said the Englishman. “Light out.”

Micah frowned. “Horses?”

The Englishman grinned. “It’s a few minutes’ hard gallop to the woods. They run deep and thick in this part of the state. We could melt right into them.”

“Can you ride?”

“Capably, yes.”

Micah had some experience with horses. He was no expert, but he could ride.

He said, “You and I?”

“Why not?”

“I do not know if I can ride with the man who stole my eye,” said Micah.

“I’m humbly sorry again about your eye. We had reason to kill each other before. Money was our sole motivator, yes? Without it, there’s no reason to kill anyone or do much of anything, truth be told.”

Micah didn’t see the line being so clear-cut. There were reasons outside of money why some men needed to get themselves dead. “What about Appleton?”

“Oh, I imagine he’s well pleased by this turn of events. The prisons will eat us all up, and he won’t owe anyone a cent.”

“I still aim to kill him.”

The Englishman grinned. “What chutzpah.”

“The woman?” Micah said.

“Piss on her head. She tried to kill us.”

Micah could see the Englishman’s point of view… still, part of him rebelled at leaving her. He was curious. Clearly her attack had been planned, which meant she knew who they were—and how dangerous, too. Knowing so, why did she act so recklessly?

“I will think on it,” he said, and shuffled back toward his bed.

“Micah.”

Micah started. It had been years since anyone had addressed him by his Christian name.

“It will have to be tomorrow,” the Englishman said.

“Can you manage?”

The Englishman coughed weakly. “With some more of that doctor’s magical cocktail.”

“You know my name. I do not know yours.”

The Englishman seemed reluctant, but ultimately he spoke. “Ebenezer.”

Micah had not known that a black man could visibly blush, but Ebenezer appeared to be doing so now.

“Ebenezer Elkins. My parents were sadists,” he said with a slight shrug. “It is the only explanation. You may call me Eb, if it suits.”

“Eb. That is good.”

“Hm. So be it.”

7

THE DOCTOR RETURNED the next day. He saturated a ball of cotton in rubbing alcohol and poked it into Micah’s socket. This caused him considerable pain, as the doctor averred it would. He offered Micah another shot of morphine.

“I do not need it.”

The doctor nodded. “The US Marshals are coming to get you, is what I hear.”

“When?” Micah asked.

“Tomorrow or the day after.”

“Just me?”

“And the other fella. The woman goes someplace else.”

The doctor passed back through the curtain. Micah heard him offer Ebenezer a shot, which the Englishman happily accepted. After the doctor had left, and once Micah could hear Eb’s morphine-thickened snores, he got up and went to look in on the woman.

She lay in bed with a sheet draped over her legs up to her hips and another folded across her breasts. Her stomach was bare. An ulcerated hole lay to the right of her belly button, oozing at its edges.

Her eyelids fluttered. She saw him. Her pupils constricted.

“Come to kill me?” she croaked.

Micah was not angry at her for trying to assassinate him. He had no leg to stand on, morally speaking, having done the same thing himself. He poured water from the bedside jug and held the glass to her lips. Gratefully, she drank.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Minerva Atwater.”

“You one of the Atwater clan out of Tuscaloosa?”

“I have no family in that part of the world.” She drank some more. “So they took your eye?”

“It is gone.”

She uttered a note of sympathy. “Was it my round that—?”

Micah shook his head. “The other man. With a little derringer, concealed.”

The sun shone through a window overlooking the main street. Micah could see the back of the deputy’s head where he stood guard.

“He hired me to get you,” Minerva said. “Appleton.”

“That was my figuring.” Micah gestured to where the Englishman lay behind the curtain. “Appleton hired him, too. But it seemed you were more intent on him than me.”

She shifted her body and winced. “Goddamn Christly hell, don’t that hurt. But the doctor says no vitals were hit.”

“Will you ever dance again?”

“What makes you think I’m a dancer?”

“You should try. You are not cut out for this.”

Minerva sneered. “You figure I should be tending home fires?”

Micah offered her another drink. She snatched the glass from him. “I’m not a spit-bubbling infant.” She drank and coughed, water dribbling down her chin. “I just only started collecting bounties. I’ll get better.”

“You will not.”

“The hell I won’t.”

“You will not, because you are finished. The Feds get here tomorrow.”

She dwelled on this. “I guess that’s fair enough.”

“It is for me and the English fellow. I do not know what you have done.”

Micah was certain that she hadn’t done much. This could very well be her first transgression. They would put her away for a long time all the same.

“Maybe they’ll hang me,” she said.

“It is doubtful,” said Micah.

“They hanged a woman named Ellen Watson up in Natrona County for cattle rustling. And Lizzie Potts in California, on account of stoving her husband’s head in with a shovel. That all went down a century ago, but still.”

“You appear to have studied these matters.”

“So what, then?” she said. “We just gonna let them take us, I guess?”

“That,” said Micah, “or we slip our necks from the noose.”

Minerva stared at him a long time.

“Take me,” she said.

“Well, I do not know.”

“I won’t be a burden. I can move as fast as greased goose shit when I have to. How would we do it?”

“Can you ride a horse?”

“I helped out at a local stable when I was a girl. To earn some pin money. Used to canter the horses around the paddock—y’know, exercise them. Most of them were nags or glue-footers, but I can ride any horse you put in front of me.”

Micah said, “Okay.”

“And him?” Minerva said, meaning the Englishman.

“Oh yes.” The Englishman’s druggy voice floated over the curtain. “I shall be along. I was hoping to leave you for the crows, but Mr. Shughrue’s veins run thick with the milk of human kindness. But be aware, milady—if you so much as look at me funny, I will snap your neck like a hen’s.”

8

THEY MADE THEIR ATTEMPT the following evening. The sunlight was paling over the ridges. Chain lightning flared soundlessly to the east. The day had been spent in nervous anticipation—they expected to catch the rumble of the marshals’ trucks down the main road. But the rumble had not come.

Their clothes had been confiscated. Their boots, too. But otherwise their wardship was surprisingly lax. They had not been handcuffed or restrained in any way. A deputy checked on them every few hours. In all, they had been treated more like convalescing patients—which they were—than ruthless and calculating mercenaries. This gave them ample opportunity to plan their escape.

The three of them grunted in pain as they wound bedsheets around their bodies. When they were done, they resembled Socratic disciples on their way to the agora. The deputy guarding them was an easy matter. Micah ethered him with the contents of a brown bottle the doctor had carelessly left in a supply cupboard—it was almost as if these gormless deputy dawgs wanted them to escape.

Micah arranged the deputy’s body in the chair, tipping his head back so he would not choke on his tongue. He took the deputy’s sidearm and walkie-talkie.

They crossed the street barefoot in the deepening night, bedsheets fluttering. A few solitary squares of light burned in the odd house window, but the street was empty. Nobody saw them make their way to the stable, looking like a trio of half-fleshed Halloween ghosts.

The stable was deserted, the horses penned. They found saddles in the tack room. It was a chore strapping them to the horses: the light was thin and they were badly hurt, and only Minerva was a true horsewoman. The horses whinnied softly, but to Micah’s ears they might as well have been shrieking. The seconds snipped off a clock inside his head, counting down to the moment when their escape would be discovered.

Micah assayed his companions. The woman was clearly nauseated with pain. The doctor had stitched her wounds with catgut, but a goodly number must have popped already, because her bedsheets were bloody—only a pinpricking so far, but the more she moved, the faster the blood would flow. The Englishman was not much better. Micah resolved to abandon them if they couldn’t keep up—perhaps they could kill each other before the authorities slapped handcuffs on them, if that was their wish.

The walkie-talkie crackled. “Wylie, come in. Edie’s off to the Sip N’ Dip for bear claws and coffee. I get you some?”

Micah pictured the town sheriff—fat and beery the way only southern lawmen could be, a barrel-shaped gut straining against the buttons of his mule-colored shirt.

“Wylie, come on back now.” Silence. Then, with a wary edge: “Wy?”

“Mount up, goddamn it,” Micah said.

Minerva and Eb struggled into their saddles. Micah knotted the deputy’s pistol to his saddle with a length of rawhide. The horses shied beneath them—Minerva’s steed was an especially twitchy specimen. Micah shouldered the stable doors open. They galloped onto the main road, cracking the stirrups into the horses’ ribs.

A few townsfolk occurred in lit windows and on the porches of the houses along the main street. They watched the criminals ride into the deep black of the mountainsides—half naked, bloody, ungainly atop animals that dearly wished to buck them off, without food or flint or medicine. What an odd sight they must have made: three pasty phantoms on horseback stampeding into the wild, like a fever dream of the Old West.

“God will see them dead,” one man said to his wife once the trio had ridden from sight. “His holy eye will seek them out and cut them down.”

9

MICAH’S EYELID FLUTTERED over his empty socket as he flogged his horse into the foothills. The slack flesh, no longer bulwarked by an eyeball, flapped in the wind that blew into his face. The eyelid made a tender sucking sound, the wet edges of each lid gumming shut before blowing open again, as he imagined wet curtains might do. The sensation was not entirely disagreeable—the wind washed into the empty socket, cooling the inflamed tissues. It felt as if it had been swabbed out with lidocaine, or essence of spearmint.

They halted after half an hour of hard riding. White froth foamed at the edges of the horses’ mouths. They had reached a split in the path.

Micah examined his companions. The woman was slumped over the saddle, her head lolling against the horse’s neck. The Englishman sat favoring his wounded hip; his sheet was red with blood, the excess running down his leg to drip steadily off his toes. His arm swayed limply from his ruined shoulder, and yet he was grinning like an idiot.

Micah considered which way to go while his companions waited patiently and bled.

“We could ride up and off the path until the ridge plateaus,” he said.

“Ride, then,” said Eb. “I will follow.”

“And if I fall,” Minerva said, her voice muffled by the horse’s mane, “leave me where I lie.”

Micah said, “I will.”

The whop-whop of helicopter blades carried over the hillsides. They sallied their horses under an oak tree; the horses’ hooves crackled on a carpet of rotted acorns. Once the whirlybird had passed on, Micah gussied his horse along the steep incline. The beast stirred up clouds of dust, which drifted into his empty socket. He probed inside it with his finger and touched an exposed nerve—a jolt of pain drove straight back into his skull.

The hillside carried up over bear grass and fescue and through a copse of gnarled desert willows. Micah’s breath exited his mouth in plosive pops as he leaned hard into the horse. Every so often, he hazarded a glance back. The other two appeared to be held atop their horses less by gravity than by some unholy magic. Their heads sagging, their bodies rocking so it seemed they would pitch into the hawthorn on the horses’ very next step. Yet they kept following Micah, a pair of ghostly effigies.

He topped the plateau. A bone-searching wind rattled the scorpion weeds. The other two caught up. Their sheets were now more blood than white. Micah gussied his horse alongside Minerva and checked to see that she was still alive. Her breath came thin and raspy.

“We must sleep together,” said Micah. “Any other way, we freeze to death.”

They led their horses to a dip in the earth bulwarked by a flat-topped chunk of shale. The limbs of a cottonwood tree fanned overhead to provide cover. Micah dismounted and corralled Minerva’s horse. He popped her feet from the stirrups and braced her across his shoulders.

“…goddamn hands to yourself,” she mumbled. She was in a dream state, trapped someplace between waking and sleeping, alive and dead.

Micah lashed the horses to a nearby tree. They nickered unhappily, hungry after the long ride. The three escapees bedded down on the hard ground. Micah wrapped his arms around Minerva. Her spine touched his chest. He twined his thick legs with hers. There was nothing sexual in this—they were too exhausted for carnalities. Micah did not find her comely in any case; he preferred a woman with breasts and hips, some brisket on her bones. The Englishman curled up behind Micah; an oily, carbolic smell leached out of his skin from the powerful narcotics he had been given.

The wind shivered empty seedpods. It churned up dust devils that spun through the gloom like mad tops. If the woman made it through the coming hours, it would count as some manner of miracle. The Englishman was a mess, too; Micah felt the blood trickling from Ebenezer’s wounds and soaking his own sheet.

If they died, he would not bury them. He had no shovel, and no time for the observance. If one of their horses was superior to his own, he would take it. He would hide out a few weeks, recuperate, then resume his pursuit of Seaborn Appleton.

He closed his eye and fell into a dreamless sleep.

10

MICAH AWOKE to spy the woman on her knees, hefting a rock the size of a stag’s head, readying to bring it down on the Englishman’s skull.

It was dawn. New sunlight ribboned through the trees. Minerva was a vision straight out of hell: her face a mask of dried blood. Her eyes bulged, wide and full of hate. Her arms quivered with the weight of the huge stone she bore above her head.

Micah rolled away, believing the blow was destined for him. He reached inside his sheet and came up with the deputy’s pistol. He pointed it at Minerva, then looked at the Englishman. The sand under his head was soaked with blood, leading Micah to the false conclusion that she’d brained him already; a closer inspection made it clear that he was merely unconscious.

Neither Micah nor Minerva spoke. Her arms trembled under the weight of the rock. Micah gestured with the gun that she should drop it. She hesitated. He then leveled the barrel dead between her eyes. She set it down softly.

Micah shook his head—his skull was quite literally buzzing. He probed inside his ruined socket with his thumb; a winged insect clambered out of it and flew away before he could identify the damned thing.

Micah flicked the gun barrel toward a stand of pines and mouthed, Move. Minerva managed to stand. Her sheet crackled with blood. The bottom of it was heavy with caked crimson and dust. She walked resolutely to the trees. Micah followed.

“That marks the second time in three days you have tried to kill the Englishman,” he said.

Minerva held a hand to her side. Blood sponged through the sheet and leaked over her fingers. She frowned as though it were coming from a spigot she’d forgotten to shut off. There was something to be admired about a person who could bleed with such a total lack of concern.

“I cannot travel with anyone who wishes to crush a sleeping man’s skull with a stone,” said Micah. “Tell me why.”

“It doesn’t concern you.”

“It does now. Until you are dead, or him.”

“It could be him that’s dead,” she pleaded. “Let me make it him.”

“No.”

“Why do you care?”

“If I am given good reason, I may be inclined to take your side in this.”

Minerva scrutinized him with hooded eyes. Her stare was calculating. The odds must have toted in his favor, because, at a breathless clip, she told him everything.

11

IT HAPPENED in the springtime. Minerva Atwater was eleven years old at the time. She lived in Grass Valley, California, with her father, Charles, and younger brother, Cortland. Their mother had died in labor with Cort, whose skull was evidently too wide for her birthing chute. The loss destroyed Minerva’s father, yet he continued on for the sake of his children, finding work in the silver mines.

They lived in an isolated shotgun shack skirting the Yuba Reservoir. In the summer months, Minerva and Cort explored the grasslands while their father toiled underground.

The day it happened was much like any other. Cort and Minny—as her father and brother called her back then—romped through the tall grass to a sandy wash, where the water rolled out blue and clean in the afternoon light. Cort was six. He was thin, his hair prone to cowlicks, and he wore wire-rimmed spectacles patched with cellulose tape. He wanted to hold Minny’s hand while they walked—sometimes she refused, finding it babyish, but Cort’s bottom lip would tremble as his eyes brimmed behind his thick glasses. He adored his big sister and was hurt when she denied him these small kindnesses. So she would take his hand, which was often sticky and moist the way only small boys’ hands can be. They would wade into the water with their trousers rolled to the knees to catch mudskippers and narrow-mouth toads.

In the late afternoon, they made their way closer to home; their father would arrive soon and call them in for supper. They lazed under the trees in a shady grove, sunlight hitting the leaves and giving their bare skin a faint green tint.

“Minny?”

“Yes, Cort, what is it?”

“Why can’t we have nice things?”

“What do you mean?”

Cort sucked on his knuckle. He’d skinned it scaling a rock.

“The Safeway has Granny Smith apples. I never seen a green like them. Different than grass green or leaf green or…”

“Or grasshopper green?”

Cort smiled. “They’s so perfectly green. But we never get none. We hafta eat the crab apples that grow around here. They give my tummy the crummies.”

“Apples are apples,” said Minny. “Don’t grumble.”

“And buttons, too. Minny, my shirt’s got two bust buttons, and Dad never gets new buttons to sew on.”

Cort held his shirt out as proof. Minny knew about Cort’s buttons. Her shirts were missing buttons, too, and her big toes had worn through her socks.

“We eat potatoes every night,” said Cort. “Boiled and baked and mashed without butter. I believe my tongue will fall off if I have one more bite of spuds.”

Charles Atwater was a fine father and a hard worker, but his one failing was at the card table. He was a gambler, and a poor one. And so, his children’s clothes had busted buttons. And so, his children ate potatoes and crab apples.

“We will eat high-class apples one day,” said Minny.

“Promise?”

“Of course.”

There came a rustling from the feather grass. Minny faced it, ears pricked. An arrow-shaped head appeared. It was green, too. Different from the grass green or leaf green or the green of a Granny Smith apple.

The green of a snake’s head. The largest snake Minny had ever seen.

She had dealings with snakes, as did any child growing up in the wilds. Harmless blackneck garters were most common, but she had startled coachwhips and Chihuhuan hognoses, even an old massasauga rattler coiled in placid contentment under the porch. But she had never seen the likes of this one.

It glided forward inch by nightmarish inch, its movements so silken it was as if its belly were lined with ball bearings. To Minerva, it was not unlike watching a train of inconceivable size steam out of a tunnel. Its scales had the shimmer of hammered copper gone green in the rain. It made its way toward them with a sickening but somehow dreamy speed, the grass whispering against its dry body.

Minerva grabbed Cort’s arm, jerking him up. He uttered a yelp of pain and confusion. The grove spilled down to the water; their only escape route was blocked by the advancing snake. Minny had half a mind to hurdle the thing. Jesus, it was thick, as stout around as a quarter horse’s leg—but she had jumped over bigger logs. But logs didn’t move the way the snake did, with those lazy yet threatening undulations. And she didn’t think the water was any way out: she was pretty sure the snake was as nimble in water, or nimbler, than on land. They would be at a disadvantage if it followed them into the reservoir.

So they had to go up. They would have to climb a tree.

Cort had seen the snake by then, too. He actually adjusted his spectacles, as if under the assumption they were deceiving him.

“That’s a biiiig one,” he said, his voice set at a high-pitch whinny.

“Go,” said Minny, shoving him toward the nearest hackberry tree.

The snake… sweet Christ, that snake. It was fourteen, sixteen, eighteen feet long. It did not have an end.

Minny did not know then that the serpent was a green anaconda, the largest of its kind. She did not know—in fact, would never know—that it had hatched in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and was netted by an indigenous tribesman while it was still an adolescent. The tribesman sold it to an exotic animal merchant. It twice escaped containment and ate that merchant’s more valued specimens, a scarlet macaw and a spider monkey. The merchant then sold the snake to a Mr. Edwin P. Popplewell, operator of the Popplewell Traveling Menagerie. For some years, the snake had circuited the southwestern states, gawped at by rubes in Bullhead City and Las Cruces. One night, while the menagerie was camped on the banks of the Yuba, the snake escaped. When Popplewell noticed that its cage was empty, he did not search for it or report it missing. The snake was a menace, having consumed both his gnu and a tiger cub, offering nothing in return save its sullen lethargy. Let it be someone else’s problem, Popplewell figured.

Minny and Cort were halfway up the tree when Cort’s footing slipped. His heel slid on a branch with a frictionless sound, as if the bark had been oiled. Next, he was falling. He uttered a fearful squawk, but that was all. It happened quickly—so quick that Minny didn’t know he’d fallen at first. There was just this terrible absence below her, as if the ghostly outline of her brother were still there.

Cort fell fifteen yards straight down. He landed on his feet, the way cats always do. The lower bones of his left leg snapped with the sound of lake ice cracking in a spring thaw. He fell over then and struck his head on an exposed rock and began to jitter as if in a terrible seizure.

The snake rushed at him. Minerva’s lungs unlocked and she screamed.

“Daddy! Daddy, come quick!”

They were within shouting distance of their shack. Their father was almost always home by this time. A punctual man, was Charles Atwater.

“Daddy, please hurry, a snake’s got Cort!”

A snake’s got Cort. It sounded so silly. Something you might cry out in a dream. But this was happening. Terribly, it was happening.

The snake could have climbed up the tree. Minerva and Cort were no safer there than on the ground, as Minerva would later realize. But that was not necessary now, seeing as its meal had fallen right in front of it. It wrapped the boy in the greasy rope of its body, which flexed and thinned as the huge muscles worked beneath its skin.

“Oh no!” was all Minerva could say, watching the snake coil lovingly around her baby brother—for she still thought of him that way sometimes, as a baby, despite the fact that he could talk and count his fingers and toes. His little feet stuck out one end of the snake’s coils, one boot off, his baby toe poking out of his sock. His head on the other end, his spectacles askew with the right lens shattered, the pressure purpling his face. Blood squeezed through the pores of his cheeks and ran from the edges of his eyes. There came a series of shuddery snaps as his ribs broke.

Minerva couldn’t stop screaming. She wasn’t screaming for her father—it was too late for that. Not for God or some divine intercession. She just screamed at the horror of it all, at the dark, sucking hole that had opened so suddenly in her life.

The snake unwound itself. Cort’s body tumbled limply from its embrace. The snake’s jaw unhinged and it began to consume the boy, starting at his skull. He might still have been breathing.

Minerva screamed until she went temporarily blind with the effort. She screamed over the hot hum of the cicadas. This did not startle the red-tailed hawk circling the sky above. From that bird’s vantage, what was happening below was simply nature taking its course in the way nature sometimes did. Something splintered deep inside Minny’s head. Perhaps she went just a little insane on that hazy sunlit afternoon. Who could blame her?

Time passed. The snake slithered back into the feather grass. Its belly was swollen with the outline of Cort’s body, stretched so that its scales separated to show the silky silverskin beneath, so sheer you could almost make out the boy’s features.

Where was her father? Why hadn’t he come with an axe, a butcher knife, with only his two hands and the fatherly madness that must come when he sees his youngest in such peril? But he never came. He’d turned his back on her and Cort.

It was night by the time Minerva’s legs unlocked and she could move again. She shimmied down the tree—her body had detached from her mind, which was totally blank. Cort’s spectacles lay on the ground. The moon glossed the one unbroken lens.

She slipped across the night-lit field to their shack. She found her father sitting dead in a chair with a bullet hole in his forehead.

Minerva was too shocked to believe it possible. It wasn’t a hole at all. No, it was just a blot of raspberry jam on his forehead. Or a flash burn he’d gotten at the mine. Never mind that his eyes were wide open and his last thoughts were splattered over the wall behind him.

She touched her finger to the hole. She would wipe away the jam, was what she’d do, then tell her father what had happened to Cort. Then they would get the axe and the cudgel and find and kill that horrible snake.

Her finger slipped into the hole. Into her father’s skull. It was cold in there.

12

“MY FATHER WAS SHOT by a black man with an English accent. A hired killer.”

Minerva trembled as she spoke. She had begun to shake, though that could be the blood loss. Her eyes remained hard on Micah throughout. “My father owed debts. To a bookie, mainly. Thelonious Skell was the bookie’s name.”

“Thel… Skell?”

She nodded. “It was Skell who hired the Englishman to claim the debt. My father—” She gritted her teeth as a wave of pain flooded through her. “My father owed him five thousand dollars. I don’t entirely blame Skell. My father owed him. But what did Cort owe? Debts should not carry forward that way.” She paused, spat a sac of blood. “It was the Englishman who did it. He stole Cort’s life by stealing my father’s… He would have saved us. If he was still alive, my father… he would have. But the Englishman killed him, and wrecked my life in the bargain. And that is the which of why I aim to kill him.”

Micah nodded. “You are sure it was him?”

Minerva said, “You figure there’s a bunch of British Negro assassins out there?”

Micah had only ever heard of the one. “You have been chasing him a long time.”

“Until that man is dead, I cannot rest. So. Will you let me end it?”

“No.”

Minerva bared her teeth. “Piss on you.”

“We are hurt,” Micah told her. “Our best chance is to band together. Once we have made our way clear, go ahead and finish matters with the Englishman.”

Minerva said, “I don’t need your goddamn permission.” Then, betraying some worry: “If I don’t kill him, he’ll kill me.”

Micah shook his head. “He will not.”

“How do you figure? I tried to kill both of you. But I tried to kill him a lot deader than you.”

Micah knew men just like the Englishman—he himself was a lot like the Englishman. Ebenezer killed because he was good at it, and because the killing didn’t trouble his soul. But he did not kill without reason or without a clear threat against him. Unless Minerva made a move, he’d bear no grudge against her for trying to flatline him back at the stables. That was just business.

“He kills for money,” Micah said simply, “and you are not worth anything.”

She silently digested this. Micah laughed real soft.

“Did you ever consider the sweetness of the moment? If you were to draw him in, gain his confidence, and then…”

Minerva bit her tongue. But Micah could tell she was pondering it.

13

THE ENGLISHMAN LURCHED into wakefulness like a ghoul shuddering from its casket. His neck wore a plated collar of blood. Micah was uncertain whether Minerva would get her chance to end his life—Ebenezer appeared to be knocking on death’s door with some urgency already.

They set off again. They were dehydrated—their horses, too—their stomachs empty and their wounds festering. Simply getting mounted required a massive outlay of will. The Englishman was sinking into a delirium; he rambled on about last night’s nightmare, where rats—the galling black-eyed bastards infesting the sewers in his hometown of Stretford—were packed into his chest cavity, squirming contentedly in the fuming stew of his guts, their ropy pink tails curled around his ribs—

“Their fur tickles.” He tittered. “So tickly.”

The sun crested the hills and beat down wrathfully. Horseflies alighted on their shoulders and heels, carrying away tasty morsels of flesh. They came to a pool of brackish, sulfur-smelling water. They drank and retched most of it back up, then drank some more. Their horses drank and exhibited a mild rejuvenation. They rode on. The sun turned the blood on their bodies to a dark crackling. The Englishman rode naked to the waist, the sheet wadded clumsily around his hips. His flesh was a heavy, beautiful black with an undernote of blue.

A rough path bled down through the swale to a swift-running river. They followed it in the direction of its flow, their shadows lengthening across still pools where the river ran into slackwater hollows. Micah spotted a pin of smoke rising some ways off. They crossed at a shallow meander, tracking the smoke. Micah drew the deputy’s pistol.

A fire. Three men sat ringing it. Naked as jaybirds, drying themselves after bathing in the river. Their clothes hung from a line knotted between two trees.

“Stand up,” Micah said.

They did. Two of them covered their privates. The third did not.

“What are you doing here?” Micah asked them.

“We’re hunting for burl,” the shameless man told him.

“Do you have a vehicle nearby?”

“A pickup,” the second man told Micah, gesturing with a nod. “Five hundred yards thataway.”

“We will need clothes,” said Micah.

“So will we,” said the man who had until then not uttered a word.

Micah said, “Do you have extra pairs?”

The same man said, “We do not.”

A pause.

Micah said, “We need clothes.”

14

SEABORN APPLETON was a happy man. Delighted, in fact.

Business was booming. He had experienced an unprecedented run of prosperity ever since Micah Shughrue had fallen off his scent.

That situation could not have resolved itself any more pleasantly. Shughrue was dead, or assumedly so. The English assassin and the woman had been cut out of the picture, too. He owed not a nickel for their services. Saints be praised!

Of course, he had felt some concern upon discovering they had escaped before the US Marshals had arrived in Mogollon. But those who witnessed their flight claimed that the trio was bedraggled, bloody, and without supplies—and on horseback, the idiots. They could not have lasted long in the unforgiving wilds. Their bones were surely yellowing inside a wolf den by now. Savages, the three of them. Appleton found no joy in his dealings with such individuals. He was a businessman. He preferred not to traffic with unsavories, other than the ones buying his merchandise.

His VW was parked in a field skirting the mining town of Chloride, New Mexico. This place had fallen upon hard times. Its citizenry was primed for the sort of succor Appleton could provide. It had gotten so that he could see the dread and anxiety hanging in a pall above such burgs. It resembled a thick gray cowl. It was an exquisite sight. It looked like money.

His men were sleeping in a car fifty yards off, in the shelter of the willows. The night was still, only the chirruping of crickets. Appleton poured a stiff belt of rum and reflected on how good things happened to good people—to enterprising people such as himself.

A sound carried across the wind-scrubbed earth, from the direction of the willow trees. A strangled scream that became a hissing whistle… the sound a man might make as his throat was cut. It was joined by a rising adagio of pain and bewilderment that ended abruptly, replaced by a wet hiccuping sound. That went on awhile, too, before being ushered into the softer notes of night.

Appleton adjusted the flame on his oil lamp, washing the VW’s interior with its shifting light. The sliding door was open. He could barely discern the flat fall of the earth, the rich soil dark as grave dirt—

“Eugene?” he called. “Danny?”

The imbeciles. They drank without measure. They played childish games and hooted laughter well into the night, only to act petulant the following morning, their heads rotten with the ache. He really should find new men, ones whose wits challenged his own.

He held the lantern out, squinting against its greasy glow. A figure coalesced from the darkness. It was joined by another.

“You dolts,” said Appleton. “If you’re looking for liquor, I have none for you. Go back to the goddamn car.”

A third figure joined. Appleton’s breath came out in a sharp hiss.

“Mr. Appleton.”

The voice seemed to come from a great distance away, deep within the guts of the earth… and yet it was close, too, so terribly close, nestled right up to his ear.

“I have come home to roost,” Micah Shughrue said.

Hearing his voice, Seaborn Appleton began to scream.

He would scream for some time before all was said and done.