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Bass Clayton stared up at the big yellow moon and frowned thoughtfully.
That moon looked way too damn much like an eye to him. He wondered if he could reach up and stick his thumb into that big yellow moon-eye. At the very least he ought to be able to shoot it the hell out of his existence.
Bass’s Daddy used to say that God looked down on the badness men got up to through a big old spy glass in the moon. Bass figured that God shouldn’t look that hard. What goes on down here in the dirt was really none of God’s business.
Something flew close by overhead.
Bass heard the flutter of wings.
He shivered a little even though it was most likely nothing but a night owl.
It wasn’t likely to be anything else that he could imagine.
He was too far up for people. Bass liked it that way – good and lonely and comfortable. The farmers and the settlers and the man in tall hats hadn’t found these hills yet – but it was only a matter of sooner or later before they finally did.
That sooner or later wasn’t worth nothing but a fist full of runny goddamn shame in the eyes – as far as Bass was concerned. He liked the emptiness that the hills out here offered a man. He liked the peace and the purity of it all. There was nothing but the darkness and the stars looking down and the moon staring blind and quiet.
Bass especially appreciated the quiet.
He had heard way too much noise – and worse things – on the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Chickamauga.
“Do you think you can take him, Bass?” Hawley asked, talking too loud as usual.
“We’ll know if I can take him, soon enough,” Bass allowed. “Unless you go and yell him the hell awake with all of your needless jawboning. You’re making more noise than a rusty tin buckboard bouncing down a frozen road.”
There always had to be a tagalong on a job like this.
As a full-time professional bounty-killer Bass Clayton would have given an awful lot to find himself an employer who would truly trust him on his own look-out – just for one time. Bass never did care much about working with other people – but there wasn’t a boss out there who ever saw things Bass’s way.
Why did bosses always think that a hired killing needed a well-paid witness? You didn’t really need to hear a tree fall over to know that the worm or the steel or the flame had taken it on down.
“Sorry,” Hawley whispered, too loudly.
Bass rode in slowly.
It never paid to hurry into a killing. You wanted to see death coming from a long ways off, rather than riding in too fast. If you could see something you could kill it – and if you killed it before it saw you the odds were that it wouldn’t get much of a chance to kill you on back.
That just made perfect sense.
“Shh,” Bass whispered.
Killing was just exactly what this going to take.
Bass had no illusions on that. A man like Silver Grimes wasn’t going to lay down his gun without putting up a fight.
Why not?
Bass sure wouldn’t go easily if the positions were reversed.
He wasn’t even all that crazy about being out here like this – but it was his job.
Besides, Grimes ought to have known better than to beat Judge Rupert Chizmar at a poker game. Judge Chizmar was an awfully sore loser and he could swear out an arrest warrant and write up a death sentence faster than a one-handed man could drop a greasy shovel.
Bass kept his eye on his target.
He could see the light of Grime’s cabin – one lonely lantern light staring out the cabin window into the swallow of a mountain nightfall.
“Is he in there?” Hawley hissed – way too close to Bass’s ear.
“No,” Bass said sarcastically. “It’s likely too warm and comfortable in that cabin for him. A rough old boy like Silver Grimes is bound to be out catching himself a little of this fine and bracing night air, enjoying the mosquitoes feeding on his arms and asshole - and the wind-shivers and the melodious farting of the hoot owls.”
“Do hoot owls fart?”
“Only if you listen for them with your nose wide open and smelling hard,” Bass said. “You’ve got to hold your mouth just right.”
Hawley was a local boy, considered tough by some. Hawley would indeed have been fine against a couple of fall-down drunks or maybe even two or three old blind men or possibly even a gang of six year old girls if he caught them at nap time – but treeing an old he-bear like Silver Grimes was a whole other story that was most likely to end up badly – no matter who told it out.
Bass wondered if Hawley even knew that.
“I don’t get it,” Hawley said. “Is he in there or not? What’s with all of this creeping hoo-diggery? Why don’t we just ride on in and kill the sorry-arsed goomer?”
Hawley raised his pistol to shoot it into the air.
Bass pulled his own pistol first.
“You shoot that pistol and I will drop you like a black bean turd.”
Hawley looked surprised at Bass’s threat.
“I just wanted to fire off a shot to scare him out.”
“Shooting holes in a perfectly good sky never made much sense to me,” Bass replied. “Sooner or later it’s all bound to come back down at you.”
“I still don’t get it,” Hawley said.
“Bass was too tired for subtlety so he settled for simple and blunt.
“You probably never will,” he said, leaning over and resting the business end of his pistol barrel firmly against the gully between Hawley’s flaring nostrils. Bass saw a booger up there in the snot holes, quivering green and leery-like in the breeze of Hawley’s sudden panicked exhalation. “Now shut the hell up or I will blow a hole in your head and stomp straight on down through the hole that the bullet leaves behind and then take my chance with Silver Grimes all on my lonesome.”
Hawley shut up, stepped back and fell flat on his ass.
As far as Bass could figure, falling on his ass was the only sensible thing the mule-headed lamebrain could have done. At least he had the sense to fall quietly. There was hope for the boy – maybe. The instinct for survival that fall demonstrated spoke of some deep and buried vestige of common sense, no matter how atrophied it might actually be.
Bass knew damn well that he was whistling into a foolish wind but it never hurt to be optimistic.
He looked back down at the cabin.
The light was still burning in the window.
That was either a good sign or it wasn’t.
Nobody wasted good lantern oil if they were sound asleep – so Bass figured that Silver Grimes was awake. He was most likely awake and sitting up, down there. Maybe he was reading a good book, although Grimes didn’t particularly seem to be the bookish sort. Maybe he was praying or smoking a pipe or wondering just how the hell he had ever got to where he was right now.
Or most likely he was squatting down there in the shadows with a rifle or maybe a shotgun.
Yeah.
That was it.
Silver Grimes was looked like just the sensible sort of a man who would favor the close-in crowd-clearing pattern of a well-made eight gauge shotgun blast. He was certainly big enough to handle the mule kick too.
Yup, Bass decided, Grimes was undoubtedly crouched down there in the darkness. Maybe at the doorway or maybe he was hunkered down behind an overturned oak table. He was down there for certain-sure, ready and waiting for what came next.
The only question was just how long of a stretch should Bass make him wait.
He had to think on that for a while.
“What are we waiting for?” Hawley whispered nervously.
Hell.
Bass decided right then and there that he was going to have to kill Hawley dead and then raise his bones back up and kill him some more before it could ever get quiet enough around here to think on just how he was going to get Silver Grimes out of that cabin for long enough to kill him dead too.
“I figure I’m going to give him twenty years or so down there and hope that maybe he’ll die off from old age or intensive boredom,” Bass said.
Hawley sat there gawking foolishly.
A man might as well try and teach pigs to fly by swinging them by their ear flaps and dropping them off of great stupid cliffs rather than wasting perfectly good sarcasm on a fool’s deaf ears.
It is a stone cold fact – if you argue with an imbecile too long or too often and some of that clabber-headed hoor-raw and head rash was bound to rub off on you.
“Close your mouth,” Bass advised. “You’ll catch barn owls and night flies, leaving it hanging open that way.”
So Hawley closed it mouth.
“Good,” Bass said. “Now keep it that way.”
Bass brought his pistol barrel up sharply, tagging Hawley’s elbow, numbing his gun hand just in case the boy got foolish or lucky. Bass then carried the movement upward, raising the pistol and bringing it down har against Hawley’s skull bone. Hawley let his breath out all at once like he had been surprised – which he had. He slumped to the ground and lay in the dirt. It was a good thing that he had been sitting at the time. Sitting left him that much less of a distance to fall from.
Bass leaned down to touch the man’s chest. Hawley was out cold but still breathing – sleeping the sleep of the comatose and brainless. Bass hadn’t hit Hawley all that hard but the bigmouth would definitely be dreaming for a while.
That was a good thing too.
Everybody needed a few dreams to scare the night darks away.
“That gets him out of my hair,” Bass whispered to himself.
He talked to himself a lot these days – especially whenever he found himself on his own lonesome.
Why not?
He didn’t figure there was anybody else around who was smart enough or dumb enough to listen.
He eyed the gun barrel warily.
A pistol whipping can play hell with your gun sight but right now Bass wasn’t all that worried about accuracy. If anything happened tonight it would most likely happen up close and sudden. There wasn’t likely to be all that much call for aiming in a close-up situation like this.
Besides, Bass generally made it a point to hit what ever he shot at.
“If you figure where the bullet is going to hit,” his Daddy used to tell him. “If you can really feel that slug sinking home into that other fellow’s brisket, then the odds are good that you are going to hit just what you figure on. Remember that, where ever you go. Shooting starts a whole lot deeper than the hand or the eye.”
Feel it, point it and don’t miss.
It sounded easy enough and it usually was until somebody started pointing guns back at you. Resistance always complicated matters and that was pretty well what Bass was worried about right now. Silver Grimes might just care enough about being shot at and get to resisting Bass right back into missing his own shot and then there was no telling what might possibly happen from there on out.
Bass hoof-hobbled his pony right next to where Hawley was lying and snoozing.
“You keep an eye on that dozy-headed clown,” Bass said to the horse, like he could understand. “You can water him if you like or even dung his brain box. Like as not you’re the smarter of the two.”
It was better this way, on foot and alone. He was close enough to walk on down and a man on a horse in moonlight made too tempting a target by far. He hauled his own shotgun out of the buffalo skin scabbard he’d paid a half-assed half-drunk Mexican hide skinner to cobble together. In that scabbard he was packing a double barrel ten gauge Greener with fourteen inch barrels – just short and ugly enough to guarantee the ruination of a man’s day for sure. It wasn’t nearly as hard-hitting as the eight gauge he imagined Silver Grimes was packing but it would do for doing with when the spark hit the possibility.
He stood there wondering just what to do next.
He should know, shouldn’t he?
After all, he was the bounty killer – the fellow that folks hired to see justice done when justice was too damn lazy to haul its fat pock-marked ass out of bed. He was a professional gunman, a hunter and a tracker – and he ought to know a bit more than a bit about how this killing business was supposed to be done.
The truth was he didn’t know a goddamn thing.
He just made it up, every step of the way. What else could any man do? There were no real clear rules in a situation like this was – beyond a simple shoot first and stay un-hit.
Bass coyote-crawled his way down through the woods, shifting his position from bush to thicket to bramble to trunk. The dirt was drought-dry and ghosted up around him in small puffs and starts that tickled his nose – but he knew better than to sneeze. He always did. His daddy had told him that he could sneak up with the best of them.
“Just a little closer,” he whispered.
It was a damn fool habit, talking to himself in the midst of an ambush bounty killing but his ears got lonesome for words sometime and his mouth had just never learned to stay shut up for very long. It could be that there was strong streak of Hawley in his blood after all.
“So shut up whispering,” he told himself fiercely.
That window light kept sheening out in the darkness and Bass kept his eyes leaning towards the shadows of the shack. He had seen moths flitter into a burning candle flame just because they could not unfix their eyes from all of that glittering light. Bass for sure was a little smarter than a moth.
He kept on moving.
When he got close enough to the shack to chuck a horseshoe through the window the light spooked out, hard and sudden.
Damn.
Was it past Grimes’s bedtime?
Did the lamp burn out?
Did the night breeze catch the candle or maybe a moth had flown too close and snuffed it cold.
Or maybe Grimes had dimmed it out.
Maybe he was waiting for Bass down there in the darkness of the shack?
Bass crawled a little closer. He had to get nearer to do much of anything. If Grimes saw him and started shooting it was too late to worry about anything more than getting close enough to kill back.
There was a tumbledown heap of firewood piled up about a good long outstretched corpse’s reach away from the cabin wall. Bass crawled up behind the logs, keeping the wood between him and the shack. If Grimes was to shoot back he’d have to hit through the firewood before he stood a chance of hitting Bass.
Bass took a deep breath.
There were two ways to come at a problem like this. One was to come around of it, sneaking in some kind of way that you figured whoever you were sneaking in on wasn’t figuring. The other was to move straight on in. Bass figured that Grimes knew someone was coming – so he figured there wasn’t much sense in sneaking any further.
“The hell with it,” Bass growled to himself. “Let’s get this over with.”
He pulled himself up over the firewood, nearly tripping and braining himself on a chunk of particularly cantankerous hickory. He fell flat against the side of the shack, swung around and brought his shotgun to the level, pointing through the window frame. He let fire, maybe accidentally, maybe not – and the shotgun kicked hard against his shoulder bone, letting him know that the load was true.
He pictured pieces of Grimes painting the walls of the tumbledown cabin but Grimes wasn’t cooperating with the strength of Bass’s vision. The return fire gun flash danced spots before Bass’s eyes. Grimes fired back out of the darkness of the shadow and the bullet cut clean through the chinking of the logs and banged into Bass’s belly, maybe breaking a rib. Ignoring the pain, Bass swung himself through the window and Grimes didn’t fire back.
“You’re dead, ain’t you?” Bass asked.
“Not hardly,” Grimes said from out of the darkness.
There was a pain tearing in his voice. It sounded as if the man had been hit, hard by the sounds of it – pretty hard.
“Not me, anyway,” Grimes continued.
Now what did he mean by that?
“Don’t move,” Bass said, pointing his empty shotgun after the voice. “I’ve got one barrel left to blow.”
“One barrel was plenty,” Grimes said. “It did the job just fine.”
There was something hiding behind Grimes’s tone of voice that Bass did not care much for. He fumbled around until he found the lantern and lit it. He could see everything clearly in the flicker of the oil wick light.
Grimes leaned against the far wall, his ass planted on the edge of an unmade bed. He was naked and his pecker pole was sticking out and dangling. Grimes breathed slowly, his face a pain-painted shade of white. His right sleeve hung a little funny on account of Bass’s buckshot blast had nearly torn his arm off.
The woman who had been lying in the bed with Grimes was in a lot worse shape, being dead like she was. The blast had torn her up good and proper. She hadn’t stood a chance. Bass felt a little sick at heart. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else up here with Grimes.
He tried not to look too closely at what the shotgun blast had done to the woman – but it sure wasn’t pretty.
“Well, you’ve disarmed me and de-livered her so I guess you’ve earned yourself a reward, bounty killer,” Grimes said. “Only she didn’t have all that much on her, least as far as I could tell.”
Bass stood there and stared at the piece of meat that used to be a living, breathing woman.
He didn’t say a damned thing.
Grimes just sat and waited.
Finally, Bass dropped his shotgun right there on the floor.
“I believe I’m done,” he said.
He turned his back and he walked away. There was nothing else to do about it. Grimes could have just as easily blown his brains out from behind.
It didn’t matter.
Bass just kept on walking.
When he got to his horse he climbed up on it, said git and the horse got.
Bass didn’t look back.
Not once.