A Lust For Lead (11 page)

The sound was as violent as the deed itself, shattering the silence into exploding fragments. Bethan fell over backwards, her head erupting in a spray of red. She had scarcely hit the ground when Nathaniel’s voice roared out through the echoes of the shot.
‘Hold your fire! Hold your fire goddamnit!’
He was not shouting at Chastity, but at his invigilators. The hired gunmen silently cursed him, angry that they could have prevented Bethan’s death if he had only given them rein to. Nathaniel knew that he was losing their respect and that if he did not resolve the situation soon that they would take matters into their own hands, and the tournament and everything that rested on it would be in jeopardy.
He was not concerned by Bethan’s death. She had been a good nanny but poor company so far as he was concerned, and he had been planning to dispose of her when the tournament was over anyway. His one regret was that she had been his best hope of getting Chastity to calm down. He still did not like the idea of going onto the crossroads in person to disarm her. He was an officer, a leader, and men like him did not do something themselves if there was somebody more expendable who could be told to do it instead.
He glanced about, searching for somebody who fit the bill. He could not call upon one of his invigilators to do it. He was stretching their loyalty just getting them to hold their fire. Neither could he call upon Whisperer, who was simply too valuable to put at risk. To his surprise, he found exactly the person he needed close at hand.
Madison had taken shelter as soon as things had turned bad, ducking into the nearest alleyway which, unluckily for her, was where Nathaniel had gone as well. She saw him looking at her and guessed his intentions just a few seconds too late to be able to escape him. He grabbed her fiercely by the wrist.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Go take that gun off her.’
Madison was still hung-over and her senses were not as sharp as they usually were, or she would have known better than to argue with him. ‘You have got to be kidding!’ she said.
The back of his fist whipped across her jaw, knocking her silent. ‘I’m not asking if you’d like to,’ he said in a low voice.
The blow caught Madison by surprise, stunning her. Amazed that she had been struck, she reached up a hand to touch her face, to prove to herself that it had happened. She had the good sense not to say anything more. Nathaniel roughly dragged her from the alley and pitched her into the street.
‘Get out there and do as you’re told you little bitch!’ he snapped.
He drew his gun and thumbed back the hammer, reinforcing his words with physical threat. Madison stared at him wide-eyed. She had absolutely no doubt that he would shoot her if she didn’t do as he said.
Tears threatened at the corners of her eyes but she blinked them angrily away. She had already let Nathaniel hit her, push her and shout at her. She was damned if she would now give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She straightened herself up and brushed the dirt from her clothes, conscious of the fact that everybody was watching her.
Just my luck, she thought. All this attention and I look like shit.
She cursed herself for having drunk so much last night. Her head was sore and her stomach was unsettled and getting worse now that she was afraid. On top of all that she really needed to pee, as if things weren’t bad enough already.
‘One thing at a time, Maddy.’ she whispered to herself.
Chastity was staring at her, intrigued by this new woman who had been pushed out into the open and made into such an inviting target. It was conspicuously tempting, and Chastity turned a slow circle, eyeing the invigilators and the other contestants and looking for danger. Madison took a hold of her nerves and forced herself to walk towards her on legs that felt heavy and strangely numb.
She got to within ten yards before Chastity swung about to face her and gave her a rattlesnake stare that stopped her dead in her tracks.
Madison had stared down the barrel of a gun before. It felt much the same this time as it had back then. A coldness seeped through her, draining her body of all feeling and leaving her numb.
Damnit Kip, why did I insist you bring me here?
She glanced back over her shoulder at where Nathaniel stood. He waved his gun at her, urging her forward and her feet scuffed in the dirt as she did as she was told. Chastity glared at her from behind the iron sights of her little revolver.
Madison was familiar with the type of gun she held. Most pocket revolvers had a five-shot cylinder, but some were manufactured to hold six or even seven rounds. She was too far away to see it clearly enough to be certain which kind Chastity held. Madison tried counting backwards to work out how many she had fired already. Fear clouded her thoughts and made it hard to concentrate.
She shuffled closer and her next step brought her level with Bethan’s corpse. She told herself not to look but she could not help it. Her eyes were drawn to the hole in the back of Bethan’s head and to the flies that crawled in the sticky red mess, picking their way between the matted strands of hair. Madison’s stomach heaved and she swallowed down hard to resist the urge to puke.
Chastity was now only a few steps away and her aim had not wavered at all in the last twenty heartbeats.
‘Nobody fire!’ Nathaniel ordered.
Madison silently cursed him. Try telling her that, she thought to herself. She forced herself to breathe deeply, to calm herself and not give in to the thoughts of panic that were clamouring for her attention.
Just another couple of steps, she told herself. She was close enough that she could almost make out the details of the gun’s cylinder. It was either a five- or a six-shot; she didn’t think it was a seven.
Fighting her fears, she took another step closer and reached out her hand.

There was no hesitation, no suggestion of compassion or mercy or any semblance of human emotion at all.
Madison reached out to take the gun and Chastity pulled the trigger.
Madison saw it coming but had no chance of getting out of the way. She covered her face with her hands and screamed but somehow she didn’t die. Seconds later, in retrospect, she realised that the sound she had thought was a gunshot had actually been the noise of the hammer falling on an empty cartridge.
She lowered her hands in surprise. Chastity stared at her as if unable to figure out why she was still alive. She pulled the trigger again and Madison flinched as the hammer fell once more onto an empty brass. Chastity became frustrated. She pulled the trigger again and again and let out an unhappy wail.
‘Give me that!’ Madison snatched the revolver out of the girl’s hand, emboldened now that she knew she was safe. She turned and held it up for Nathaniel and the invigilators to see. ‘I’ve got it,’ she cried triumphantly.
Her words were drowned out as Chastity began to scream. The noise lanced through Madison’s hangover like a bullet to the head. Madison clapped her hands to her ears. The girl kept on screaming, filling her lungs and howling like a fiend.
Madison staggered away and fetched up suddenly in Nathaniel’s arms. He took the gun away from her and pulled her hands away from her ears. ‘Take her into the hotel and get her calmed down,’ he told her. ‘You work for me now.’
Madison was too stunned to argue with him. Agree with him, her mind told her. For the time being just do as he says. Survive now, find a way out later; it was a policy that had gotten her through many bad scrapes in the past.
Wincing against the pain in her head, she accepted Chastity’s arm as Nathaniel offered it to her and dragged the child toward the Grande. She was still alive, and that was all that really mattered right now.
Nathaniel stood in the middle of the crossroads and watched her go, admiring the shape of her figure from behind. He was joined by Buchanan, who surveyed the bodies that Chastity had left littering the street.
‘I think,’ Nathaniel said. ‘That it would be prudent if we only give Chastity one bullet in future, like Ennis.’
Buchanan did not disagree.

Jeb MacPherson had come to Wainsford for the same reason as the others. Sick of earning a living wasting small-time crooks and cattle thieves, he was looking for a last big score to set him up for his future. At twenty-eight years old, he figured it was time to stop killing and find himself a real job.
Jeb had lot of smarts, a lot more than people usually gave him credit for. His quiet, shy-seeming exterior hid a keen mind and he knew from the moment he learned that Shane Ennis and Castor Buchanan were in town that he stood no chance of claiming his reward if he acted alone. And so Jeb had started rallying together a small group of men, thinking that there was strength in numbers.
Jeb MacPherson was dead now. Three shots rang out, splitting the midday calm and sending him staggering backwards on lifeless feet.
More shots followed, a blazing frenzy of blood-letting that left his comrades dead as well, and in the centre of this maelstrom of murder Shane Ennis walked with his guns spitting lead and fire, his coat tails billowing behind him like the tattered wings of the Angel of Death.
Legally appointed as town marshal and with Castor Buchanan newly deputised, he had wasted no time in introducing a new kind of law to the bounty hunters in Wainsford. His rules were simple: ‘Join me, or die.’
In just a few short hours the number of bounty hunters in town was reduced by half, leaving only those who agreed to Shane’s leadership. He deputised them accordingly and paid them fifty dollars each.
One man snubbed the money and spat on the floor in disgust. ‘That’s horseshit! I got offered a thousand dollars to kill Hunte. Ain’t no way I’m helping you for fifty.’
The other bounty hunters shuffled away from him, leaving him to face Shane alone.
‘How much do you want?’ Shane asked him. He spoke quietly and his voice sounded reasonable, but his hand had moved to rest on the butt of his revolver. The man glanced over his shoulder, looking for somebody to back him up.
‘Well?’ Shane said.
The man lost his nerve. ‘Fifty dollars is fine,’ he said.
Shane organised them into shifts so that there were three men covering the jailhouse at any given time. He had them set up firing positions behind barrels and crates, and had a cart wheeled out opposite the jailhouse door, where a man could crouch and fire. His men cleared out the surrounding buildings and smashed windows on the upper floors, so that every angle could be covered and there wasn’t a chance in hell that anybody could get out of the jailhouse, or take food and water in without getting shot down on the way.
If Fletcher wasn’t coming out then Shane would starve him into submission. And if that didn’t work then in a couple of days they’d set fire to the jailhouse and burn them out. Either way, Benedict Hunte was a dead man.
As nightfall settled that evening, Shane inspected his troops. The marshal was keeping his head down and the jailhouse was silent as a church, with no lights inside to reveal the occupants to Shane’s gunmen. Buchanan was keeping watch round the back, and he was sore at it. ‘I don’t see why you want a man here anyway,’ he argued. ‘Ain’t no way they’re coming out this way. Not unless they cut through the fucking wall.’
‘Town appointed me the new marshal.’ Shane said. ‘And I appointed you my deputy. That means you stand guard where I tell you to stand guard.’
‘Don’t let this shit get to your head.’ Buchanan snarled at him. ‘I’ve shot marshals before.’
‘And I’ve shot deputies.’
Shane returned to his hotel room. He laid himself out on the bed without even bothering to kick off his boots and stared up at the ceiling, waiting. For all the stories that had been told about him, it was rarely understood that Shane’s guns were the least of his weapons. Any fool could shoot a man and sooner or later any fool who did was bound to get himself either shot or hanged. That was the way of things. But Shane was smarter than that.
He had never seen other people the way normal folk did. He didn’t think of them as individuals but instead saw them each as cogs in a machine. Every person’s actions affected those of the people surrounding them, whose reactions affected others, and so on.
As a child with very few friends, Shane had used to amuse himself by provoking situations and trying to predict how the consequences would ripple through the small town society in which he had grown up. By the time he had reached adolescence, he had become adept at understanding people and manipulating them. A few words in the right places could do a lot more damage than an equal number of bullets.
Shane closed his eyes. He had set events in motion earlier that day, events that would have dire consequences, but consequences that would ultimately suit his needs. Now all he had do was bide his time and let it all play out.
He woke shortly after midnight, hearing the sound of violence outside his window. It was the noise of a door being kicked down some distance away, accompanied by shouting and a woman’s screaming. There were cries of protest that were answered by an animal snarl and the sound of a shot ringing out. Then silence, long and pregnant; a prelude to the horrors that were to come.
Shane did not think about what he had started. He felt neither joy nor sorrow or guilt. The crimes that Buchanan committed were of his own choosing, and Shane did not really consider that he was himself to blame. Not really. He closed his ears as the screams began in earnest, the sounds of two people being tortured by the man whose love of inflicting pain rivalled that of the Devil.
Shane rose from the bed and walked over to the window. He saw the curtains twitch in a house across the street and caught a brief glimpse of a frightened face as somebody looked out to see what the noise was about. All across town, people did the same. They looked and they listened but they did nothing to stop it. In time, an old man came running down the street. ‘Marshal Fletcher! Marshal Fletcher!’
The bounty hunters stationed around the front of the jailhouse took aim as he approached. Others, woken by the noise, flocked to their positions in anticipation of the killing that was to come. Shane did nothing.
As the old man drew close to the jailhouse, Fletcher called out to him from inside. ‘What the Hell’s going on out there, Ed?’
‘It’s Ben’s parents!’ The old man held back, reluctant to come any closer with the bounty hunters so near. ‘I’m sorry, Marshal. The bastard just kicked down the door!’
There came an almost bestial howl from within, a sound of purest human rage. Shane heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside, heard Fletcher’s voice cry out: ‘Don’t Ben, it’s a trap.’
Ben swore at him. From the sound of what got said, Shane guessed that the old lawman was trying to bar his path and keep him from opening the door. There was the sound of a fight, the hard smack of a fist against somebody’s jaw and, moments later, the bolts were drawn back.
The three bounty hunters stationed opposite put fingers to the triggers and took aim.
Fletcher cried out. ‘Ben. No!’
But it was too late. The door swung open and Ben ran out into the murderous night, brandishing his shotgun and a heartful of rage. He hadn’t gone a step when the three rifles gave fire and illuminated the scene in a brilliant white flash. The scene burned into Shane’s eyes like the image of a photograph. Ben’s chest imploded as the volley struck home, stopping him dead in his tracks. He staggered, eyes wide, as if uncertain what had happened. And then a second volley blew him backwards through the open door.
A couple of men ran out and charged the doorway but it slammed shut before they could reach it and the bolts were thrown. Guns appeared at the loopholes in the wall and fired, and one man was hit, falling wounded while the others fled back to take shelter behind the barrels and the crates. They fired in return but their shots did nothing but chip splinters out of the jailhouse wall. The night’s killing was over. The deed was done.
Shane slinked quietly back to his bed and Castor Buchanan played his games until late in the morning, when two gunshots brought an end to an old couple’s suffering and closed another dark chapter in his list of crimes.