Chapter 12
Jeb MacPherson had come to Wainsford for the
same reason as the others. Sick of earning a living wasting
small-time crooks and cattle thieves, he was looking for a last big
score to set him up for his future. At twenty-eight years old, he
figured it was time to stop killing and find himself a real
job.
Jeb had lot of smarts, a lot more than people usually gave him
credit for. His quiet, shy-seeming exterior hid a keen mind and he
knew from the moment he learned that Shane Ennis and Castor
Buchanan were in town that he stood no chance of claiming his
reward if he acted alone. And so Jeb had started rallying together
a small group of men, thinking that there was strength in
numbers.
Jeb MacPherson was dead now. Three shots rang out, splitting the
midday calm and sending him staggering backwards on lifeless
feet.
More shots followed, a blazing frenzy of blood-letting that left
his comrades dead as well, and in the centre of this maelstrom of
murder Shane Ennis walked with his guns spitting lead and fire, his
coat tails billowing behind him like the tattered wings of the
Angel of Death.
Legally appointed as town marshal and with Castor Buchanan newly
deputised, he had wasted no time in introducing a new kind of law
to the bounty hunters in Wainsford. His rules were simple: ‘Join
me, or die.’
In just a few short hours the number of bounty hunters in town was
reduced by half, leaving only those who agreed to Shane’s
leadership. He deputised them accordingly and paid them fifty
dollars each.
One man snubbed the money and spat on the floor in disgust. ‘That’s
horseshit! I got offered a thousand dollars to kill Hunte. Ain’t no
way I’m helping you for fifty.’
The other bounty hunters shuffled away from him, leaving him to
face Shane alone.
‘How much do you want?’ Shane asked him. He spoke quietly and his
voice sounded reasonable, but his hand had moved to rest on the
butt of his revolver. The man glanced over his shoulder, looking
for somebody to back him up.
‘Well?’ Shane said.
The man lost his nerve. ‘Fifty dollars is fine,’ he said.
Shane organised them into shifts so that there were three men
covering the jailhouse at any given time. He had them set up firing
positions behind barrels and crates, and had a cart wheeled out
opposite the jailhouse door, where a man could crouch and fire. His
men cleared out the surrounding buildings and smashed windows on
the upper floors, so that every angle could be covered and there
wasn’t a chance in hell that anybody could get out of the
jailhouse, or take food and water in without getting shot down on
the way.
If Fletcher wasn’t coming out then Shane would starve him into
submission. And if that didn’t work then in a couple of days they’d
set fire to the jailhouse and burn them out. Either way, Benedict
Hunte was a dead man.
As nightfall settled that evening, Shane inspected his troops. The
marshal was keeping his head down and the jailhouse was silent as a
church, with no lights inside to reveal the occupants to Shane’s
gunmen. Buchanan was keeping watch round the back, and he was sore
at it. ‘I don’t see why you want a man here anyway,’ he argued.
‘Ain’t no way they’re coming out this way. Not unless they cut
through the fucking wall.’
‘Town appointed me the new marshal.’ Shane said. ‘And I appointed
you my deputy. That means you stand guard where I tell you to stand
guard.’
‘Don’t let this shit get to your head.’ Buchanan snarled at him.
‘I’ve shot marshals before.’
‘And I’ve shot deputies.’
Shane returned to his hotel room. He laid himself out on the bed
without even bothering to kick off his boots and stared up at the
ceiling, waiting. For all the stories that had been told about him,
it was rarely understood that Shane’s guns were the least of his
weapons. Any fool could shoot a man and sooner or later any fool
who did was bound to get himself either shot or hanged. That was
the way of things. But Shane was smarter than that.
He had never seen other people the way normal folk did. He didn’t
think of them as individuals but instead saw them each as cogs in a
machine. Every person’s actions affected those of the people
surrounding them, whose reactions affected others, and so
on.
As a child with very few friends, Shane had used to amuse himself
by provoking situations and trying to predict how the consequences
would ripple through the small town society in which he had grown
up. By the time he had reached adolescence, he had become adept at
understanding people and manipulating them. A few words in the
right places could do a lot more damage than an equal number of
bullets.
Shane closed his eyes. He had set events in motion earlier that
day, events that would have dire consequences, but consequences
that would ultimately suit his needs. Now all he had do was bide
his time and let it all play out.
He woke shortly after midnight, hearing the sound of violence
outside his window. It was the noise of a door being kicked down
some distance away, accompanied by shouting and a woman’s
screaming. There were cries of protest that were answered by an
animal snarl and the sound of a shot ringing out. Then silence,
long and pregnant; a prelude to the horrors that were to
come.
Shane did not think about what he had started. He felt neither joy
nor sorrow or guilt. The crimes that Buchanan committed were of his
own choosing, and Shane did not really consider that he was himself
to blame. Not really. He closed his ears as the screams began in
earnest, the sounds of two people being tortured by the man whose
love of inflicting pain rivalled that of the Devil.
Shane rose from the bed and walked over to the window. He saw the
curtains twitch in a house across the street and caught a brief
glimpse of a frightened face as somebody looked out to see what the
noise was about. All across town, people did the same. They looked
and they listened but they did nothing to stop it. In time, an old
man came running down the street. ‘Marshal Fletcher! Marshal
Fletcher!’
The bounty hunters stationed around the front of the jailhouse took
aim as he approached. Others, woken by the noise, flocked to their
positions in anticipation of the killing that was to come. Shane
did nothing.
As the old man drew close to the jailhouse, Fletcher called out to
him from inside. ‘What the Hell’s going on out there,
Ed?’
‘It’s Ben’s parents!’ The old man held back, reluctant to come any
closer with the bounty hunters so near. ‘I’m sorry, Marshal. The
bastard just kicked down the door!’
There came an almost bestial howl from within, a sound of purest
human rage. Shane heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside, heard
Fletcher’s voice cry out: ‘Don’t Ben, it’s a trap.’
Ben swore at him. From the sound of what got said, Shane guessed
that the old lawman was trying to bar his path and keep him from
opening the door. There was the sound of a fight, the hard smack of
a fist against somebody’s jaw and, moments later, the bolts were
drawn back.
The three bounty hunters stationed opposite put fingers to the
triggers and took aim.
Fletcher cried out. ‘Ben. No!’
But it was too late. The door swung open and Ben ran out into the
murderous night, brandishing his shotgun and a heartful of rage. He
hadn’t gone a step when the three rifles gave fire and illuminated
the scene in a brilliant white flash. The scene burned into Shane’s
eyes like the image of a photograph. Ben’s chest imploded as the
volley struck home, stopping him dead in his tracks. He staggered,
eyes wide, as if uncertain what had happened. And then a second
volley blew him backwards through the open door.
A couple of men ran out and charged the doorway but it slammed shut
before they could reach it and the bolts were thrown. Guns appeared
at the loopholes in the wall and fired, and one man was hit,
falling wounded while the others fled back to take shelter behind
the barrels and the crates. They fired in return but their shots
did nothing but chip splinters out of the jailhouse wall. The
night’s killing was over. The deed was done.
Shane slinked quietly back to his bed and Castor Buchanan played
his games until late in the morning, when two gunshots brought an
end to an old couple’s suffering and closed another dark chapter in
his list of crimes.
Shane did not know if it was something about
Covenant or whether it was just his state of mind that made his
memories so vivid, but he could remember that night as if it had
only just been.
He did not really feel guilty for what he had done, but he was not
proud of it either. It rested on his heart with a heaviness that
was hard to simply shrug off and forget.
It had been the lawyer, Boyd, who had told Shane that Ben’s parents
lived in town and where they could be found. He had no doubt
intended that Shane use them as leverage, although he had probably
not anticipated that they would die in the process. Then again, it
was equally as possible that Boyd simply hadn’t cared.
Shane had relayed the information on to Buchanan but had made a
deliberate point of telling him to leave them alone. In the brief
time that he had known him, Shane had come to understand a lot
about the sort of things that motivated Buchanan, and he had known
that the best way to get him to do something was to specifically
tell him not to.
Having planted that particular seed of rebellion in Buchanan’s
mind, he had then further nurtured it by giving him the most
pointless assignment he could think of that night by posting him to
cover the back of the jailhouse. He had anticipated that Buchanan
would get bored and frustrated, and that he would abandon his post
and go after Ben’s parents, partly to spite Shane but mostly for
his own amusement.
What had happened next was not something that Shane had really
given much thought to. He had just wanted Ben lured into the open
so that he could be shot. Setting Buchanan onto his parents had
simply been the easiest way of doing it.
Looking back, it was easy for Shane to see why he had done it. He
had been afraid. He could have killed Fletcher the first day he
arrived in town, shot Ben and Alan Grant and killed Hunte there and
then instead of drawing things out the way he had. But he had been
afraid to. After what had happened at the Babson ranch, he had not
wanted to shoot anyone unless he was completely sure that his
motives were his own and, perhaps because he had respect for him,
he had decided from the start that he would not kill Fletcher, no
matter what happened.
And so he had decided to wage a psychological war against the old
lawman instead, to crush his spirit and wear him down. And he had
started by killing Ben and Ben’s family.
Shane blinked the thoughts away. On the crossroads, the
invigilators were busy cleaning up the mess that Chastity’s rampage
had caused. Shane watched as they dragged the dead into a side
street. They showed no particular regard for their own fallen
brethren, treating them instead with the same casual disrespect
that they showed the dead contestants. Their weapons were
collected, their bodies stripped of anything valuable that could be
kept or bartered.
The invigilators were hard men. They had few friends amongst each
other so far as Shane could see, and viewed one another mostly as
rivals, albeit rivals who were presently bound in a common cause.
It was interesting because it suggested a weakness that Shane could
take advantage of.
He had been thinking and he had decided that if he was going to
escape from Covenant he would take Chastity with him.
He was a realistic man. He did not believe in atonement. Nothing
that he did with the rest of his life could bring back the men and
women he had killed, or undo the pain and suffering that he had
helped to propagate. But he could not respect himself if he fled
from this town and left a six year old child to suffer a fate that
he himself was afraid to meet. Whatever else he had done wrong in
his life, there was still a level past which he would not allow
himself to sink.
The problem was how would he escape?
He dared not try shooting his way out. His soul was already
balancing on a razor’s edge. He was halfway to Hell already and
there was no way of telling how many more killings it would take to
push him the rest of the way, straight into the arms of the Fastest
Guns. It could be one; it could be twenty. He dared not take a
chance.
But equally he did not think that he could slip past the
invigilators without some kind of a fight. What he needed was an
accomplice, somebody who could do his killing for him. He thought
about it and, yes, there was someone who fitted his requirements.
But it would all depend on who won the next match.
The crossroads shimmered beneath a watery heat
haze as Vendetta and Nanache went out to face each other. The heat
was sweltering and Vendetta’s long brown hair clung to the back of
her neck in sweaty strands. Nanache’s blue army jacket was open and
he played with his necklace of bones as he walked. He stroked
specific joints between his finger and thumb and sang to them in a
quiet voice. Shane got the impression that he was calling on their
individual talents, readying himself for the battle to
come.
Vendetta showed no sign of being intimidated by her opponent’s
alleged supernatural powers. She stared at him, uncaring and
unemotional, her expression fixed in a look of grim determination.
Nanache held up his hand to her and mimed cutting off one of his
fingers and putting it in his pocket. He pointed at her and
laughed.
The invigilators regarded them both warily. Chastity’s rampage had
left them twitchy and there was a palpable sense of hostility in
the air.
Vendetta shook her head and rotated her shoulders, loosening them
up. She adopted a three-quarters side-on stance with her left leg
leading. Nanache stood square. They both glanced over at the Grande
as Nathaniel rose to his feet. He held up his hands for
silence.
The two contestants readied themselves.
And Nathaniel called it.
Vendetta snatched her gun from the holster, drawing and firing in
rapid succession and blood splattered the dirt behind Nanache as
her first shot ripped through his shoulder, snapping the tendons
from his bones. He gritted his teeth against the pain, but no
amount of bravery could get his ruined arm to work. He grabbed his
revolver with his left hand but it cost him valuable seconds,
leaving Vendetta with ample time to fire again.
She raised her gun in a two-handed grip and took aim, firing two
shots that caught him in the chest and neck, and Nanache dropped to
his knees. Left-handed, he fired, but the shot was the product of a
delayed impulse running through his nerves. He was dead already and
the shot hit the ground just six paces in front of him, kicking up
a plume of dirt.
He hit the ground facedown, his last breath rattling in his throat.
Vendetta regarded him coldly for a moment, her gun trained on him
in case he so much as twitched, but when he did not move she turned
away and holstered her revolver.
Shane watched her as she strode from the crossroads. With skills
like hers, she was exactly the sort of person he needed if he was
to get out of town. All he had to do was convince her to help him,
and he already had an idea about how that could be
achieved.
He began to think about how he would make his move.
In the topmost room of the Grande, Madison was
also thinking of escape.
Covenant had turned into something of a disappointment for her. She
had come expecting to meet some of the best gunfighters in the
world but so far all of the really big names had failed to show and
the best she’d seen were Shane Ennis and Castor Buchanan, both of
whom were way past their prime. To make matters worse, Kip was dead
and she had realised too late that she had really cared for him and
now, in addition to being lonely, she was trapped in a ghost town
in the middle of nowhere, forced to be a baby-sitter for the
youngest mass-murderer in American history.
She had never felt so low.
Her one consolation was that at least Chastity had stopped
screaming now. She sat quietly on the other side of the room,
perched on the edge of a wicker peacock chair like a discarded
ventriloquist’s dummy, legs hanging in empty space just a couple of
inches off the floor.
It had taken ages for Madison to get her to calm down. Madison had
never had any younger sisters growing up and she had no idea how
you were supposed to deal with an upset child. She had begun by
making a few ineffectual shushy noises, but when that had met with
no immediate success she had fled to the opposite corner of the
room and sat there with her hands over her ears, hoping that the
child would settle down in her own time. Several minutes later it
had become apparent that was not going to happen, and so she had
plucked up the courage to go back to her and had bundled her into
her arms and rocked and soothed her and, in time, she had coaxed
her into being quiet. It had taken a lot out of her and Madison had
finished up on the window seat, staring out through a circular
window at the crossroads below, nursing her sore head and feeling
sorry for herself.
The window gave her an excellent view of the gunfight between
Vendetta and Nanache, and Madison was pleased to see Vendetta win.
She took heart that the only other woman in town was kicking
ass.
Women gunfighters were few and far between and seldom ever amounted
to much. Inspired by the dime novels that she had used to read with
her daddy when she was a little girl, Madison had once dreamed that
she might become one, but the sad truth was that she had never
turned out to be very good with a gun. Her talents lay elsewhere.
She had been born with the double blessing of beauty and the wits
to use it. The way she looked, the way she dressed and the way she
spoke were her weapons of choice, and with them she could get a man
to give her almost anything she wanted.
Nathaniel had caught her off guard earlier. If she hadn’t drunk so
much the night before she would have had the sense to keep out of
his way, but that was largely irrelevant now. The mistake had been
made and now she was suffering for it. What she had to do now was
find a way to turn things about and make the situation work to her
advantage before she wound up like Bethan.
And that meant establishing some kind of hold over
Nathaniel.
In another time and another place, she might have willingly done so
anyway. Nathaniel was not bad looking. He was older than her but
that was not a problem; she liked a little experience in a man. He
was powerful and he had money; two things that Madison craved. But
right here, right now, it was just too soon after Kip and she would
not have even contemplated it if she didn’t think her survival
depended on it. Nathaniel was an abusive bastard and he was
dangerous. If Madison wanted to survive him and get out of Covenant
intact then she needed him to be nice to her. Already, she had come
up with a plan.
She prepared by smartening herself up. She twisted her hair into a
couple of plaits to bring it under control and washed her face,
cleaning away the marks where her tears had caused her eye make-up
to run. With two hours before the next match was fought, she
thought it likely that Nathaniel would want to come and check on
her and Chastity and, sure enough, she heard the door bang
downstairs as he entered the building. She quickly hurried over to
position herself at Chastity’s side, grabbing one of the child’s
dolls so that it looked as if she had been playing with
her.
The key turned in the lock and Nathaniel entered. His expression
softened when he saw Madison and Chastity together. ‘I had half
expected to have to send my men to look for you,’ he
admitted.
Madison gave him a shy smile and, ignoring his comment, said in a
soft voice: ‘She’s quietened down now.’
‘I can see that.’
Nathaniel pushed her gently to one side and knelt before the girl.
He examined her face and neck and rolled up her sleeves to take a
look at her arms. While he did so, Whisperer came into the room and
positioned himself at the doorway, blocking Madison’s escape.
Nathaniel was looking for bruises, she realised, and was offended
that he would think that she could be such a bitch. ‘I didn’t hit
her,’ she protested.
‘No. You didn’t.’ Nathaniel said, finishing his examination. ‘And
it would be a very bad idea if you ever did.’
‘I wouldn’t do anything like that.’ Madison said
indignantly.
Nathaniel said nothing but rose to his feet again and took her by
the arm. He steered her over to the one of the two beds in the room
and bade her sit next to him. ‘What is your name?’ he
asked.
Madison told him.
‘Yes, I remember now. Kutcher introduced you. My condolences, by
the way. But nonetheless, the fact remains that he should not have
brought you here. The Fastest Guns do not appreciate
spectators.’
‘I understand that now, sir, and I’m sorry. I would never have come
if I’d known I wouldn’t be welcome.’
Nathaniel patted her on the thigh. ‘It’s no matter. If you hadn’t
come then Bethan’s death would have greatly inconvenienced me. As
it stands, you will make an adequate replacement. Don’t you agree,
Whisperer?’
‘She certainly has her qualities,’ the tall man replied.
‘That she most certainly does.’ Nathaniel said, giving Madison’s
chest a lustful glance. ‘Although in future you will be well
advised to bear them with a degree of modesty more befitting that
of a lady. Kutcher may have tolerated you dressing like a whore but
you’re mine now, and I will have you conduct yourself properly. If
you do not have anything less brazen of your own to wear then I
suggest you see if anything of Bethan’s will fit you. Lord knows
she won’t be needing it any more.’
He went on to explain what Madison’s duties would be. Chastity was
incapable of performing even the most basic functions without
supervision. Madison would have to dress, feed and wash her. It was
a lot more than Madison would have liked. But put up with it for
now, she told herself. The time will come later when you can ditch
the little bitch and get the fuck out of here, but for now you have
to toe the line.
‘What is it that’s wrong with her?’ she said out loud.
‘She is special,’ Nathaniel explained. ‘Chastity cannot think for
herself, not like you and I do at any rate.’
‘But she’s so good with a gun.’
Nathaniel smiled but didn’t offer any sort of an explanation. He
cupped Madison’s chin in his palm. ‘You will find that I can be a
very kind master,’ he told her. ‘Attend well to Chastity and you
will be rewarded. Money, jewellery; I can give you whatever you
desire. But do anything to hurt Chastity, or disobey me just once,
and I will give you to Buchanan. And believe me, you wouldn’t want
that.’
Madison knew all about Buchanan’s reputation. ‘I won’t let you
down,’ she said quietly, biting her tongue to try and make the
words sound sincere. In two days time, the tournament would come to
an end and she was sure that the Fastest Guns would show up to
watch the final bout. We’ll see how tough you are when I’ve got one
of them to protect me, she thought to herself.
She had lost Kip and that was bad, but it was time to revert back
to her original plan and bag herself a real gunfighter.