Image: Tobias Krieis
Read Part One here.
Sixkiller rides under moonlight up the river road. He’s on the hunt now, deep in the fevered agitation that will drive him until he makes that kill. The Boss will visit the torments of hell on his body till he gets the job done.
He can hear the noise of Meridian’s nightlife from here. The silver mines are rich and the ranges thick with cattle, and the men who own and work them spend lavish money in the mining towns that dot the riverbank between here and Mexico.
This night’s prey is one of those highrollers, he guesses. The image in his mind shows him a brown haired man in a good shirt and handsome snakeskin boots. And that silver ring. The ring burns bright in his mind, clear identification of the target. His pay for this one? He lets that hopeful thought linger in case the Boss is listening.
Coming up on the road into Meridian, Sixkiller slows the horse to a walk. Town lights flicker through the branches of cottonwood and palo verde trees above the riverbank. He needs to think a little now, searching ahead for the location of this man. It comes to him after a moment: a whisky-smelling place with lights and music and women. Either the Silver Lady Saloon or Maggie’s House.
Sixkiller smiles. He’ll be on his way by dawn.
The horse shies suddenly. Sixkiller reins in, reaching for his revolver. His senses, burning sharp, stretch beyond him. He feels rather than hears the sounds beyond the bend in the road: human footsteps, quick and light, pattering in the hard packed dirt.
Sixkiller waits, gun in hand.
Silhouetted against the lights, a woman quicksteps around a thick stand of brush. She’s wearing nothing but a dressing gown of Chinese silk and a thin linen shift underneath, and she freezes at the sight of Sixkiller on his tall bay horse.
“Here now,” says Sixkiller. Staring at the gun in his hand, the woman clutches the dressing gown around herself and shrinks back into the bushes.
“I don’t aim to hurt you.” Sixkiller speaks slowly and softly, as if to a panicked pony, and he knees the gelding gently toward her. His mind jumps with the need to kill and get it done. But the look on this woman’s face stops him. She’s dead scared and desperate, going out into the night with no more on than that skimpy robe and a pair of satin slippers.
“You in trouble?” Sixkiller asks.
The woman meets his gaze. Moonlight shows Sixkiller her bruised red lips and the makeup running down her cheeks. Dark streaks slash across her face and neck, like warpaint gone wrong, and the dressing gown’s splashed with stains Sixkiller knows way too well.
Her eyes, wide and smudgy dark, size him up too: black, nothing but black, shirt and trousers and boots on a tall man with black wavy hair on his shoulders and a strong dark face with its Apache nose and African lips.
“Can you take me to Tombstone? Or, no, Agua Linda, across the border?” she blurts, glancing over her shoulder down the empty road into town.
“Sorry. My business is in Meridian,” Sixkiller tells her. The Boss prods, fire in his head and along his nerves. “Somebody after you?”
“No. Maybe. Probably soon.” Even with the fear in her eyes, the woman smiles, and Sixkiller knows her profession. “Can’t that business wait, a little? I’ll make it worth your while.”
The fanciest whore in the Territory can’t compete with the Boss, not when there’s a job on the line. But she’s a woman bloodstained and alone on the road, and Sixkiller is a gallant man.
“Sorry,” Sixkiller says. “I got to go. I can take you as far as –“
“Please. I can pay you,” she says. “Look.” She stretches out her hand. Under the moonlight, the ring gleams in her palm: broad silver band, inlaid with big chunks of turquoise.
“It’s yours if you take me across the border.”
A sudden chill shivers in Sixkiller’s mind, draining away that prickly hot feeling that drives him to do the job – a job pinned on the image of a man’s long-fingered hand, decorated with a ring just like that one.
Slipping the revolver back into its holster, he swings out of the saddle.
“Where’d you get that?”
The woman closes her fingers over the ring and takes a step backward. “I found it. It’s good silver, you can bank on that.”
“You didn’t find it.” His face is a blur in the dark, but the woman hears the edge in his voice, and she takes another step, backing into the bushes.
“Where’d you get it?”
Tonight Argentine has killed. Behind the shock of it burns a fierce satisfaction. She knows she can do it again. Now, if she has to. Pulling the gent’s pistol from her pocket, she stands up straight and meets the eyes of the man in black.
“Don’t come any closer.”
Watching the pistol, he steps cautiously, gauging her will and ability to use it. “I don’t mean to harm you,” he says. “But I need to know about that ring. Put the gun down and we’ll talk.”
She levels the pistol at his chest. “Will you take me?”
“Yeah, sure.” Sixkiller closes the distance between them in one long stride and snags her wrist with one hand and the pistol with the other, twisting it out of her grasp. She pulls away, but his fingers tighten. For the second time that night, Argentine gathers her strength and aims for the crotch.
He dodges aside. “God damn!” But his grip slackens briefly. Argentine stumbles free, lurching for the tall bay horse.
She’s halfway into the saddle when he hauls her down and sets her hard upon the ground. The ring flies from her grip, landing in the dirt by the roadside. One iron-fingered hand on Argentine’s arm, the horseman retrieves it, holding it high for her to see.
“The man who wore this. Where’d you see him? What happened to him?”
“Let go of me. And I might tell you.” The ring gleams in the moonlight. Argentine reaches for it, but his grip tightens.
“Listen. I don’t give a damn about what you’re up to. But I need to know one thing. Is he dead?” The horseman leans in. Moonlight sheens the dark planes of his face. The fury in his eyes sets Argentine’s heart to hammering.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Are you the law? A bounty man? What’s in it for me if I tell you?”
“I could say, your life, darlin.” The stillness in his voice tells Argentine what she needs to know. This man lives outside the law.
“I killed him.” Argentine hears herself say, just as if she’d said, I borrowed your new stockings.
The man in black stares at her. “God damn,” he says. “Well, Boss, what do you think of that?” He laughs a long time, face raised to the moon and the starry sky.
Shaking his head, he opens his fingers. Freed, Argentine stumbles backward. He tucks the gorgeous silver ring into his shirt pocket and swings into the saddle.
“Wait!” Argentine pulls the dressing gown artfully down over one shoulder. “What about me?”
The man in black smiles, a shark’s grin in his dark face, and reaches down a hand to her.
Argentine smiles too, and scrambles up, swinging a bare leg across the smooth worn leather of a very good saddle. Dizzy with an exhilaration that drives away fear, she wraps her arms around the horseman’s waist, breathing in the smells of tobacco and sweat on his shirt.
Turning the horse off the road toward the river, he comes to a stop behind a thick stand of cottonwoods where the water runs like silver, curling and licking at its banks. Cocking his head, he listens. Argentine listens too, hearing nothing but the sounds of the river and the distant clamor of music and laughter from town.
“All right,”he says. “We've got some talkin to do.”
“He got rough.” Sitting crosslegged before a little campfire in the river sand, Argentine tells it all to the man called Sixkiller. There’s been no sound of pursuit, no traffic on the road. She wonders if they’ve found the gent’s body yet.
The sky is full of stars and blackness, now the moon has set. Sixkiller offers her jerky and biscuits from his saddlebag. He’s calming now, the frantic hammering of his blood fading as it becomes clear the kill is out of reach. The Boss doesn’t waste his good tools.
Argentine bites vigorously into the jerky. “I was scared. But I don’t feel bad at all. He had it coming. And -- I felt like I was flying.” She glances up at Sixkiller. “I bet you know what that’s like. You’re a hired gun, ain’t you.”
Sixkiller’s lived by his guns since he was seventeen, had his nickname by the time he was twenty. But it’s only since the Boss took over his dreams that he’s killed so many, for so many unknown reasons. “I do my job, that’s all. Same as you.”
Argentine reaches for a biscuit. “But it’s all so romantic,” she says. “Here’s you, dashing all over the desert, killing people who deserve to die. Just like Robin Hood.”
“Oh, I don’t know if they deserve it or not,” Sixkiller tells her. “I follow orders, and I get paid. The Boss won’t take no for an answer. If I didn’t do what he tells me – he’d know. And I’d pay for it.”
Downstream, a coyote calls, and another answers with a yipping laugh. Others join in, a chorus of high-pitched howls rejoicing in their own moonlight kill.
“Sixkiller?” Argentine asks when their laughter dies away. “Who’s your Boss?”
“Ah, now that’s the question.” Sixkiller almost regrets settling down all cozy for a chat. But no one’s ever snatched a job from under him like that before, and he’d had to find out how. Argentine is sharp and tough, and he likes her enough to tell her the truth.
“I don’t know for sure,” he says. “Though I suspect it’s Old Scratch himself. I met him once, in the flesh. He offered me a bargain. I was dead broke and stupid, said yes without another thought. Forgot about it till he came to me in a dream one night, telling me a certain man had to die.”
Sixkiller stares up at the stars for a long minute. “I figured it was just a nightmare, so I didn’t do the job. After, I was like to die, burnin from fever like a heatstroke for days. Now,” he tells her, “I do what I’m told.”
Argentine watches the play of firelight on the gleaming jet handle of Sixkiller’s revolver.
“I wanted to be a singer,” she says.
Toward dawn, Sixkiller dreams another crimson dream. This dream shows him a fat little merchant man, riding a swaybacked horse along the road into Tombstone. A big gold pocket watch drapes across this man’s broad belly, and the horse carries a brace of loaded saddlebags.
Sixkiller’s eyes snap open to a sunrise sky. The wind is cool and sharp, ruffling the tumbled hair of Argentine, who sleeps wrapped in her ridiculous little dressing gown on the other side of the fire.
A sniff and a rustling, and Argentine sits up. “Sixkiller?” she says. “I had the strangest dream. All red, like blood, like a desert on fire. And oh, the handsomest gent was in it, talking to me!”
Smiling, she rubs at a streak of dried blood on her chin.
Sixkiller’s stomach tightens, but he makes himself speak calmly. “What did he say?”
The crusted blood won’t budge. Argentine licks the hem of her dressing gown and scrubs at the smear, talking all the time.
“He said I had what he needed.” The words rush out. “He said if I help him, I could be top of the marquee in San Francisco! Sold out shows every night!“
She’s missing most of the blood. Sixkiller reaches over and, taking the damp silk from her fingers, wipes her face as best he can. “Listen, darlin. You don’t want to get tangled up with —”
“And he told me about this little fat man, down in Tombstone,” Argentine chatters on, ignoring him. “Told me we’re to kill him.”
We? Sixkiller stares. The horizon’s turning golden with the sunrise. He’d meant to be on his way at first light. But now —
Sixkiller has a sudden vision of a vast crimson desert, stretching toward mountains the color of iron. He can almost taste that hot dust, feel the searing wind on his face.
Why? He asks the burning presence in his mind.
Why? The Boss mocks. Because I always need good tools.
Sixkiller blinks, and he’s back in this silver morning, with doves starting to call in the cottonwood trees and Argentine scrabbling in the sand for her slippers.
There’s no fear in her bright eyes, only a wild feverish joy. “I said I would.”
Sixkiller shakes his head. The Boss does hire only the best.
So he fishes in his pocket for the silver and turquoise ring.
‘“Yours,” he tells her. “You earned it.”
Argentine runs a finger around the thick silver band. “I did, didn’t I.”
She remembers how it was to kill that gent. How it was to feel like flying. She could do it again. Maybe just this once. She slips the ring over her thumb, admiring the way it gleams in the new sunlight.
Sixkiller reaches for his saddlebags. “Come on then. We got us a job to do.”
Such good strong storytelling!