Nowhere, Wyoming
The Russian Wager Saloon
“You’re dead … we … we killed you!”
Pint-sized Deputy Parnes was only half right, but one could hardly blame the guy for his error. The tall, broken man who staggered through the saloon-style doors was in fact more akin to the walking dead than the usual local living variety.
SCRAPE… SCRAPE… these were the sounds the broken man’s work boot made on the floor as he dragged a useless, ruined leg behind him. The pant leg soaked with blood left a crimson trail on the wooden floors behind him. The man’s thick flannel shirt was also stained with dark patches of red. He’d have been considered handsome if his left eye weren’t swollen shut and his right one filled with blood. How he saw anything at all was anybody’s guess. His dark hair was slick with sweat, and blood steadily streamed down the side of a face twisted in anguish. The man’s left arm hung loosely at his side like a broken doll’s.
The Russian Wager Saloon, formerly called the Buck Shot Saloon until the Russian mob moved into town and claimed it, resembled the saloons of the old west. The bar did have a few modern conveniences such as a brightly-colored jukebox, digital cash register, and a fancy new mechanical bull in the back room. When the broken man first stumbled through the doors he met the usual cacophony of nightclub sounds: music, laughter and a loud din of conversation. Deputy Aleksandr Parnes, hardly a good-looking fellow, had been flirting with a black-haired beauty, swaying drunkenly to the tune of Laura Bell Bundy’s sultry “Drop on By”. Considering Deputy Parnes was most responsible for the broken man’s condition, he was understandably the most surprised to see him walk into the bar.
The broken man knew he wasn’t long for this world. Only vengeance drove him onwards, if for only a little while longer.
When he spoke, he sounded harsh, his words barely above a whisper. “Deputy Parnes, the next time you murder someone… (cough),” the broken man inhaled and wheezed like a man whose lung had been punctured and was filling with blood, “You might want to make sure he’s dead.”
At these words Deputy Parnes un-chivalrously shoved jukebox girl aside and reached for his service revolver.
BOOM!
Broken man’s gun roared. Normally he kept the .44 Magnum locked in the glove compartment of his wife’s SUV. The heavy duty weapon was strictly for camping in the deep woods, so it was loaded with .270 grain bullets. The locals called the heavy duty rounds ‘bear killers’. When the small cannon ball roared from the barrel of his gun, the bullet didn’t take Parnes’ head off, but it came just shy of it. The deputy’s left eye was crammed in on itself; the near-headless body thudded to the floor.
But Deputy Parnes wasn’t the one the broken-man was really after. Parnes was just one of the hired hands.
Yuri Semyonovich Ivanov, about sixty, had a haggard face and usually wore a disinterested expression. Yuri and his mob had terrorized the town since their arrival from formerly known as Russia twelve years ago. Officially Yuri was a local businessman who had somehow acquired the local grocery store, auto shop, and only car dealership in town, all in short order. Unofficially, as most the locals knew, he led the Russian mob. You didn’t mess with him, or you’d end up dead.
Presently, Yuri sat at the table with the broken man’s soon-to-be-ex boss, Sheriff Larry Landenberg. Sheriff Landenberg sported a typical law enforcement walrus mustache and close-cropped hairdo. The broken man had made the connection between mob boss Yuri and Sheriff Landenberg a little too late. As a result of his dimwittedness his wife and two young children were lying at the bottom of Devil’s Gorge.
At the moment, the two dozen people still in the bar stood frozen. Most were armed, but after watching Deputy Parnes’ head disintegrate, none reached for their weapon. At least not yet.
“Anybody else who wants to leave best do it now,” the broken man mustered. The effort caused him to hack up more blood but his message had come across well enough. All but four men sitting at the table scrambled for the front door. Like the décor, not much had changed from the old west. Not really.
Sitting with Yuri and the sheriff was also a terrified, middle-aged accountant type. When the accountant spoke, his voice quivered like a terrified little boy. “Deputy, I had nothing to do with what happened to your family,” he said, slowly rising from the table with his open palms toward the broken man, his briefcase tucked neatly under his armpit. “You know I just do the books. P-p-lease. May I go, too?”
“Abram, you coward,” Landenberg growled under his breath.
The broken man tried to reply but only hacked up more blood instead. In answer, he weakly waved the nose of his revolver toward the front door. The accountant scurried for the exit. He nearly tripped as he ran, his pants clearly stained.
“That’s enough, Deputy,” Sheriff Landenberg said in a commanding voice, “Put that gun down right now!” The sheriff tried to sound authoritative but his voice cracked towards the end. It seemed as though even the seasoned law enforcement officer was a little unsettled by the headless Deputy Parnes.
The broken man leveled his pistol at the sheriff, cocked the hammer, and tightened his finger on the trigger. When the broken man spoke again his voice was more strained. Sheriff Landenberg heard him though because there wasn’t a sound in the place, save the bartender crouched behind the bar, urgently whispering into his cell phone to the cops.
“We’ve been friends for six years, Larry. Our kids went to the same school together. I trusted you.” The broken man stifled a sob in the back of his gun hand.
Sheriff Landenberg used the distraction to discreetly slide his hand under the table.
“You know, she didn’t die right away … my wife. Both kids died instantly in the crash but my wife… I listened to her choke on her own blood in the end.”
The broken man recalled how Landenberg and Parnes had taken out the tires of his wife’s SUV with a well-placed stop-strip on the bridge over Devil’s Gorge. After bouncing down the cliff walls their battered vehicle had finally come to rest upside down in the ravine. The creek water trickling in was what first revived him. His children’s broken little bodies in the backseat were the first to meet his then focusing eyes.
Sheriff Landenberg raised his one hand still above the table in silent plea. “Now wait a minute. We can still work this out. Just look at yourself. You, you need medical attention. I’m sorry for what happened, I truly am.” He pointed at Yuri beside him. “But you’ve got to know that Yuri made me do it. Please, I’ve got a wife and kids too.” the sheriff said, sniveling now. He thought the broken man wouldn’t notice his one hand slowly reaching for his pistol under the table as he begged for his life with the other.
Sheriff Landenberg was wrong, and he did notice.
BOOM!
For a second time that evening the broken man’s gun thundered. Sheriff Landenberg, caught in mid-draw, flipped over backward in his chair as though a cannonball had shot him in the face.
The broken man casually cocked an ear towards the exit. He could already hear the State Trooper’s sirens screaming for him in the distance. There wasn’t much time left.
He turned toward the two remaining men in the bar: Russian mobster Yuri Ivanov and his right hand man, Petrov. Even the bartender who had called the troopers had high-tailed it out the back. Petrov shuddered in his seat, but Yuri was cool as formerly Russian snow. “You’d won. We were leaving,” the broken man explained, grief-stricken. “You had everything and everyone you could possibly want in this stinking town. Why couldn’t you have just let me and my family go?”
Yuri was unafraid. His expression was acceptance. He came from a place much crueler than small town USA. Every day he wasn’t gunned down in the street was a surprise to him. When the Russian mobster spoke it was with but the vestige of an accent. Yuri had worked hard to lose it completely over his time in America. “You know that’s not the way it works, my boy.”
“No,” the broken man answered sadly, his vision blurring in his one good eye, breathing for perhaps only a few moments longer. “No, I reckon it ain’t.”
Yuri and Petrov simultaneously reached for their auto-pistols. The broken man’s pistol rang out two more times. Like the corrupt sheriff, Petrov was dead before he hit the floor, but impossibly, Yuri was groaning from the floor a few seconds later.
With his last remaining ounce of strength, the broken man grabbed the table and flipped it over and out of the way.
Yuri’s shoulder had been completely blown away but he was still alive. Unlike before, he stared back with a look of fear. “Please … please don’t kill me.”
The broken-man leveled his pistol at Yuri’s face. One bullet left. At this range, he wouldn’t miss, even with his vision blurring by the second. He had barely heard the state troopers pulling up outside a few seconds ago. Now they were bursting through the front door, guns drawn, demanding that he drop his weapon. At their range, they wouldn’t miss either.
Deputy Sheriff Hank McCarthy’s last thoughts were happy ones: his wife and children on last Christmas morn’.