Gypsy Blood (47 page)

That was when the eighth bullet hit—dead bang on.

It opened Jonah’s skull like a can of peaches.
 
A fistful of his brains splattered across the buffalo skull.

Jonah saw a flash of red light lifting off the Heavens, singing in his brain like a burning double lasso.
 
Flights of screaming angels, soaring like coal oil buzzards through a hot orange sky in long looping figure eights.
 
He saw the last ebbs of coal in a tamped down campfire whispering good night.

Then nothing.
 
Nothing at all.
 

He was dead long before he hit the ground.

And he hadn’t heard that shot, either.