Herne had caught the sound of heavy feet climbing the stairs of the hotel, rising above the noises of the Tucson day, and he had tensed, as he had on every previous occasion. The odds against any shootist living beyond his thirtieth birthday were long enough, but he’d survived for twelve years more, and that was one of the reasons he had become a living legend throughout the frontier lands.
‘Why don’t you relax, Jedediah?’ whispered Adeline Fuller, her finger idly tracing an old scar near her wrist, smiling across at him.
‘Relaxation’s just a step off dyin’,’ he replied, hand poised as the boots came nearer, counterpointed by a heavy voice singing.
‘And if you ask her why the Hell she wears it,
She wears it for her lover in the …’
A key chinked to the floor of the corridor and the voice stopped in mid-line. The song had been one traditionally as popular with the United States Cavalry as ‘Garryowen’ itself.
That meant …
‘Jesus on the cross! It’s Albert back early!’ squeaked Adeline Fuller, suddenly seeing the nightmare of her life becoming flesh.
The key turned in the lock, even as Herne’s fingers were closing around the butt of the Colt, ready to draw it from the dangling holster.
‘You here, you damned slut?’ came a voice that seemed to mix honey and lead in it, overlaid with liquor.
The Peacemaker slipped easily into Herne’s fist and his thumb tugged down on the spur of the hammer, cocking the gun with the unmistakable triple click. He leveled the pistol at the opening door, knowing without a shadow of doubt that the odds were he was going to have to use it.
The other man was still in uniform, the vest hanging open, buttons missing. His face was flushed, pouches beneath both eyes, and the holster over his heavy Colt Army pistol had its flap open.
‘Who the fuckin’…’ he asked, jaw dropping, eyes straggling to focus on the naked man in his wife’s bed. With his equally naked wife lying at his side.
‘Don’t try it, soldier,’ said Herne, pitching his voice quiet and calm, still with the outside hope that it wasn’t going to end in a killing.
‘Adeline! You damned slut, whorin’ after anyone who’d give you a—’
‘It wasn’t my fault, Albert.’
‘I’ll put a bullet through your fuckin’ head after I’ve dealt with this … Christ! He’s a fuckin’ old man, Adeline!’
‘No!’ That wasn’t what she’d hoped for. In her deranged mind Adeline had created a scene where the two men would not fight. They would both look at her and they would shout at her, using the worst kind of language. Then they would both whip her and slap her finally taking her together, using her body to …’No!’ It wasn’t going to be like that. And she had lost touch with reality to such an extent that she had actually been believing her fantasy. But life is rarely if ever like our dreams.
‘Don’t go for the gun, soldier,’ warned Herne, wishing that he’d kept his boots on as he usually did. But all his clothes lay jumbled on the floor at the bottom of the bed, close by Captain Fuller’s feet.
‘He forced me. Used that gun against my breasts, dear. Truly.’
‘Lyin’ bitch,’ grunted Jed.
Fuller was so drunk that his mind wasn’t functioning all that fast, but he knew that it wasn’t right for a man to stand there while a stranger... a rapin’ stranger, called his own wife a lying bitch. No, that surely wasn’t right at all.
‘Not right, mister. My wife says—’
Fuller still hadn’t made any kind of a move towards his own Colt. Just standing there, one hand on the edge of the door, swinging it very slowly backwards and forwards, giving Herne glimpses of the empty corridor beyond.
‘Your wife says that, then she’s just what I think.’
‘What’s that, Jed?’ shrieked Adeline, eyes flicking between the two men, still hanging onto a vestige of her dreams.
‘Jed? Jed who? Seems you know him fuckin’ well an’ you rapin’ he was ... I mean sayin’ he was tryin’ to rape you.’
‘I didn’t—’
Herne had to raise his voice to try and be heard above the boiling storm of words. ‘Soldier! Your woman here’s a whore and a liar. Only difference between her and an honest whore is that she don’t even claim money for what she puts out.’
Adeline’s reaction was so violent that it took Herne by surprise. The shootist had been keeping his eyes locked to the heavy-built figure in blue, by the door, concentrating on holding the Peacemaker steady and cocked. The woman suddenly lashed out with the back of her hand at him, catching him across the bridge of the nose with her knuckles. The pain was electrifying, bringing tears that blinded him. The force of the blow sending him sideways, nearly knocking him clean off the bed. His finger tightened on the trigger and if it had been filed down a hair’s width more he would have put a bullet clean through the hotel window.
As it was he was totally off balance, fighting to recover. Seeing Fuller snatch the moment to leap back into the corridor, slamming the door shut behind him.
‘Bitch!’ hissed Herne.
But Adeline Fuller wasn’t finished. Kicking out hard at him, her bare heel hitting him a glancing blow in the groin, making him yelp with the shock. Then she was out of bed, running towards the closed door, screaming out to her husband.
‘Kill him, Albert! Shoot the bastard!’
‘Get away,’ shouted Herne, recovering himself, leveling the gun at her white back.
‘Kill him! Kill—’
Her hand was on the knob of the door, rattling it as she tried to turn it with fumbling, terrified fingers. Outside, Captain Fuller had drawn his own heavy pistol, thumbing back on the Colt’s hammer. Trying to hold it steady.
The door finally began to open, against a barrage of shouting from all three of them.
Herne was ready to fire the moment that Fuller showed himself. He’d considered gunning down the woman, and he would have done it without the least compunction, but she might provide him with cover from her husband and that was potentially valuable.
But the way the dice fell it didn’t much matter.
The officer fired first, seeing a figure through the gap in the door, putting two bullets into it. As the door swung shut again he fired three times more, feeling the Army Colt buck in his hand, seeing great jagged holes appear in the panels, the wood splintered white through the brown coat of varnish.
And he heard a single scream that died away into a long, bubbling moan.
From inside the room, Herne saw the other side of events.
Adeline staggered back at the sound of the first shot, pushing at the door so it closed again, but by then she had been hit a second time. The first bullet hitting her high in the right shoulder, tearing a fist-sized chunk of flesh, spraying blood all across the room, dappling the yellowed ceiling The second slug buried itself in her sagging belly, folding her up like an eager courtier, her good hand going to hold herself. That was when she screamed, once, leaning her forehead against the closed door.
Herne threw himself sideways off the bed, guessing that the shooting wasn’t over. Whitey Coburn, his old friend, now dead, used to say: ‘Man starts pulling on the trigger, he mostly finds it hard to stop until the gun’s empty.’
Albert Fuller was no exception to that. Pumping three more bullets through the thin door into the room, pausing a moment, and following it up with the sixth and last round in the pistol.
Number three caught his bending wife through the throat, punching out the back of her neck in a welter of blood and tiny shards of pale bone. The scream faded away into a bubbling moan as the impact of the bullet sent her toppling on her back, legs kicking. Above the acrid scent of the black powder smoke, Herne realized that Adeline had fouled herself as her muscles began to relax in death.
The fourth bullet broke a flowered china bowl on a wash-stand, chipping plaster from the wall behind. The fifth came within a couple of feet of Herne’s head as he peered cautiously round the side of the bed, shattering the window. And the last one went higher, ricocheting off the brass frame of the bed, whining into the ceiling and showering the crouching shootist with flakes of paint and plaster.
‘Adeline?’
Herne ignored the call from Fuller. The woman was as near dead as makes no argument and his only concern was the best way of getting himself out alive. In the corridor he heard voices, calling, asking what was happening. Fuller shouting drunkenly at the top of his voice that his wife was being held by a gunman and killer.
Jed began to dress himself, as quickly and silently as he could. Feeling safer as soon as he had his pants hauled up and buckled. Tugging on the worn boots, flexing his leg against the sheathed bayonet.
Wondering whether Fuller was sober enough to be reloading his pistol, or whether he was too drunk to even realize that he’d used the full six rounds. Listening to the growing noise and to Fuller’s protestations for them to go away and let him rescue his dear woman.
‘Your dear woman’s messin’ up the floor in here with three of your bullets in her, Fuller,’ shouted Jed Herne, stilling the bedlam outside.
‘Adeline, wounded?’
‘No.’
‘Then?’
‘Dead, you brainless, drunk son of a bitch!’ called Herne, completing his dressing. ‘You shot your own wife. Three times. Took out most of her throat with the last round!’
In the silence he could catch voices whispering. Out through the broken window he heard a man yell that the sheriff was on his way. By the time that the law arrived Herne figured it would be as well to be on his way out of Tucson. Though he was innocent, and the evidence was clear against Fuller, it might still mean a long delay, and if there were any other soldiers in town the U.S. Cavalry was known for looking after its own, even when they were incapable drunks who’d gunned down their own wives.
‘Time to go,’ Herne said to himself.
Though the door was still shut, he could just see the dim blur of the dark blue uniform through the shattered panels. Walking cat-footed feeling the stickiness of the woman’s blood on the soles of his boots, Herne made his way to the wall alongside the corridor, pistol still cocked in his right hand.
‘You come on out, you coward!’ bellowed Fuller, not sounding entirely sure that he really wanted to see Jed. And if he’d known that the shootist was the notorious Herne the Hunter he’d have been considerably less keen on meeting him.
Jed doubted that the soldier was even capable of the delicate operation of reloading the Army Colt without dropping it all over the floor. Drink and percussion pistols didn’t go well together. So the chance was a carefully calculated one. If he was going out against an armed man, then Herne could easily get himself killed. But he figured that Fuller was holding an empty gun.
He was right.
The door jammed as he pulled it open, making a squeaking noise, one of the panels falling lopsidedly out as he finally moved it. Seeing Fuller with the Army Colt aimed at his guts. Faces disappearing like a frightened town of prairie dogs at the confrontation.
Fuller’s face mixing rage and fear as he saw Herne come through the door, only five paces away from him; pulling the trigger. A dry, sharp click. Another and then another.
‘That’s enough,’ said Herne quietly.
Shooting the soldier through the forehead, the impact of the forty-five kicking him backwards, his heels slipping on the floor of the corridor. Blood blossomed crimson between Fuller’s eyes as he lay there, mouth working, hands twitching.
‘Shouldn’t have …’ said Captain Albert Fuller, and then he was dead.
Herne was away from the hotel and out of Tucson in less than four minutes, heading off south and east, into the red-orange wilderness towards the border with Mexico.
~*~
A week later he was near Nogales where he gunned down two Mexican horse-thieves and earned himself fifty dollars.
Giving himself a time to stay down there for another couple of days.
It was then that Thaddeus Ray, the New York journalist, and his wife, Carola, arrived in Nogales. They’d heard the news about Geronimo taking off from the escort and had been told their best bet of finding any action was to go towards Mexico. Carola complained endlessly about the blistering heat that dried her skin and made her lips swell and crack. Isaac had vanished three days earlier when they were leaving the train but he had succeeded in catching them up, mumbling apologies and asking where the nearest cantina was so that he could go and revive himself. At least he still had his camera so that if they ever did get to see Geronimo he’d be able to try and take his picture.
~*~
The Chiricahua leader was not that far away from the Rays, lying on his stomach on the top of a shallow mesa watching the tiny specks of blue-uniformed soldiers cantering away from him, towards the west. Geronimo smiled at the sight.