Wickman came in late in the evening, wearing his fast-draw rig and his bowler hat. The hat was tipped down over his forehead.
“Hey,” he said, “Hitch. I heard you was up the north end of town this morning, looking at the pine trees.”
I looked straight at him and didn’t say anything.
“Heard somebody took a shot at your ass,” he said.
I kept looking.
“I was you I might not go walking around,” he said. “You know? I might stay right here in the saloon and hide behind my shotgun.”
Go right at ’em, Virgil used to say. There’s trouble, go right at ’em. Right now.
“You shoot at me?” I said.
“Me,” Wickman said.
He was playing to the audience that had begun to gather.
“Me?” he said. “Why would you think it was me?”
“’Cause you’re a back shooter,” I said.
The banter went out of Wickman’s voice.
“I ain’t no back shooter,” he said. “You don’t know nothing about me. Every man I killed was facing me straight up.”
“I know a back shooter when I see one,” I said. “I bet you never shot a man wasn’t drunk. This morning you missed me by five feet.”
“I missed shit,” Wickman said. “I wanted to I coulda put that bullet right between your ears.”
“So you was just thinking to scare me,” I said.
Wickman opened his mouth and closed it and backed away a step.
“Didn’t work,” I said.
“I’m just saying it was me shot at you I wouldn’ta missed.”
“Naw,” I said. “’Course you wouldn’t. You’da drilled me from behind, back shooter.”
“Don’t call me that,” Wickman said.
The audience began to spread out a little. I thumbed back both hammers on the shotgun and rested the butt on my thigh with the barrels pointing at the ceiling.
“You ain’t behind me now,” I said.
“You think I’m going up against that eight-gauge,” Wickman said.
“I ain’t pointing it at you,” I said.
The audience spread out farther.
“I’m pointing the shotgun at the ceiling,” I said. “Good gun hand should be able to clear leather and drill me ’fore I can drop the barrels.”
I was right, there were people who could win that matchup, and I wouldn’t have made them the offer. But I was betting that Koy Wickman wasn’t one of them. I was probably the first person he went up against that he couldn’t bully, maybe the first one that was sober, and almost certainly the first one that was sober and had an eight-gauge shotgun. He backed up another step. The audience gave him plenty of room.
“Want go drink a little courage,” I said. “Come back later?”
He went for it. He was pressured, probably scared, and I was right. He wasn’t that good. He fumbled the draw slightly and I hit him in the face with both barrels. It turned him completely around and propelled him about three steps before he went down. It didn’t blow his head off like I’d said it would. But it was an awful mess. I reloaded.
The room echoed with silence, the way it usually did after a shooting. The smell of my gunshots was strong. Wickman’s Colt was ten feet from his outstretched hand. He’d never even aimed it. People looked briefly at what was left of Wickman and looked quickly away. The people who had been standing closest to him were spattered with blood and tissue. One man took his stained shirt off and threw it away from him. I thought about Virgil Cole again.
You gotta kill someone, do it quick. Don’t look like you gotpushed into it. Look like you couldn’t wait to do it.… Sometimes you got to kill one person early, to save killing four or five later.
Wolfson came into the saloon from wherever he’d been, with two Chinamen. One Chinaman had a big piece of canvas, the other one had a bucket and mop. He nodded at the mess I’d made on his floor.
“You fix,” he said to the two Chinamen. “You clean one time. Chop, chop.”
The men went about it without expression. The one with the tarp wrapped it around Wickman and dragged him out through the door they’d come in. The other one mopped the floor.
“Anyone comes down from Liberty to ask about this,” Wolfson said, “I’ll talk to them. Everybody saw him draw on you… and the sheriff’s a friend of mine.”
I nodded, thinking still about Virgil’s advice. Virgil was always clear, and he was always certain. But he wasn’t always right.
I was hoping he would be, this time.