MICAH AWOKE BLIND.
He sat up with a jolt. Where was he? His final memory: the Englishman’s bullet snapping his skull back, followed by a terrible squelch inside his head.
He lay on a threadbare mattress, or so it felt. He could tell he was naked save for a pair of underwear.
Sightless.
An icy thread of fear spun around his heart. What goddamn use was a blind gunman? Forget killing Appleton—if he was blind, he could be killed by a child. A beggar could sneak up and slit his throat.
His fingers spidered up his chest, his face . . . he felt the bandages wound over his eyes. He unraveled them. Oh, thank Christ. He could see. He blinked. His view improved. He was in a makeshift infirmary. White privacy curtains were draped around his bed. He ran his fingertips around his right eye socket, the eye he could see out of. His fingers investigated the left eye next, figuring that the eyelid was gummed shut with blood or was otherwise occluded—
His index finger pushed past the sagging lids and into the sticky vault where his eye had recently resided. His fingertip grazed the raw flesh at the back where the nerves collected. He gasped.
“Christ, careful what you’re doing!”
A man had stepped through the curtains. He wore a much-bloodied shirt and a hat with a beaten crown. Needles of sweaty hair protruded under its wide brim.
“Quit poking at it. It’ll get infected, turn to sepsis. And you see, I can’t very well amputate your head. That would be what you call a terminal decision.”
“You a doctor?” said Micah.
“Who the hell else would I be? Who else goes around fixing shot-up morons?”
“You took the eye?”
The doctor nodded. “I took the eye.”
Both men were silent a spell.
“It does not hurt,” said Micah. “It . . . tingles.”
“I flushed the socket with a numbing agent and gave you a shot for the pain. But you’ll feel it soon enough. It won’t be pleasant.”
“Did you have to take my eye, Doc?”
The doctor removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. His hands were stained with blood the way a mechanic’s hands can get with axle grease—the skin takes on the tincture of the substance that he works with all day.
“I am no surgeon. I administer to the men and women around here, most of them farmers or ranchers. If a hand gets crushed and we can’t get them to the hospital two towns over, I take it off. A foot mangled, off it comes. Better to lose a limb than die of septic shock.” He reseated his hat. “Your eye was obliterated, Mr. Shughrue—yes, I know who you are. The bullet glanced off your ocular ridge—the bone, I mean to say—and dodged around inside the socket. A lucky break; otherwise it would have passed through into your brain. Then all you’d be good for is drooling.”
“How did you remove it?”
“You really want to know?”
“Tell me.”
“A tool called a curette,” the doctor said. “A sharpened spoon, pretty much. I scooped it out, snipped the nerve. The eye was smashed fruit. Useless even as a decoration.”
The doctor possessed little in the way of bedside manner, but Micah was grateful for his candor.
“You could be fitted for a fake one, Mr. Shughrue. Or a patch.”
“Maybe I will keep it the way it is,” said Micah, filled with momentary despair. “Or have a flagpole jut out of it with a little flag at the end, the Stars and Stripes like the kids wave at parades.”
“It would be patriotic of you,” the doctor said dryly.
Micah pulled his knees to his chest. He was sore but otherwise unhurt. “The black fellow?”
The doctor said, “He’ll pull through. He was shot through the hip and shoulder. No organ damage.”
“Where is he?”
The doctor gestured to the other side of the curtains. Micah craned his head toward the bedpost, where he always hung his pistols—
“They’ve been confiscated,” the doctor said, sensing the intent. “The other fella’s, too. Now, you could get up and try choking him to death, but I’d tell the deputy stationed outside and he’d shoot you dead.”
“I will stay here, then.”
“That’s a good boy.”
“The woman?”
“She’s here also,” the doctor told him. “She’s hurt. She won’t be bothering anyone.”
“A bounty hunter, I’m told.” A chuckle. “Not worth a damn at her job, though, is she?”
Micah leaned back in bed. “So?”
“You’ll all live. You will all go to jail. You and the black man for the rest of your natural lives. The woman might get out just in time to start collecting Social Security. From what I gather, you have dodged the law a long time, Mr. Shughrue. Now you’re going to have to pay the ferryman.” He shrugged. “I hear tell you might even get the electric chair.”
“So why recommend a fake eye for me? It will just melt out of my head!” Micah laughed until a tear came out of his good eye. Something might have squirted out of his empty socket, too, but he couldn’t tell. “Hell of a thing, Doc. Healing me up so I can be fried.”
The doctor allowed himself a small smile in acknowledgment of how ludicrous his task must seem. He then drew liquid morphine into a syringe. “I’ll give you this so you can sleep.”
“But Doctor, is it habit-forming?”
The sawbones chortled at this. He administered the shot and squared his hat to Micah. “Get some rest.”