1.

Ravenswood

Pecos County, Texas

October, 1879

 

Jedediah Sykes tasted steel.  And gunpowder.

 

Again.

 

He let his lips settle on the barrel of his 1851 Navy Revolver.  His tongue cradled the grooved underside of the pistol.  It was more comfortable that way.  The front-end weight of the gun rested in his mouth.  Not deep enough to make him gag—experience had taught him not to slide it in that far, but deep enough to make sure that the lead ball would do its job.

 

The ivory-handle rested in his left hand.  The hammer was already drawn back, another thing he'd learned to do ahead of time.  Cocking the pistol backwards—while it was already in his mouth—was not as easy as it looked.

 

Sykes balanced the butt end with one hand as he slipped his finger around the trigger.  He felt the resistance, gave it a gentle squeeze, but not enough to do the deed.  Not yet.  The 1851 Colt Navy was an extension of him.  The pair of thirty-six caliber side-arms was never far from his side.  He trusted them.  They were reliable.  Dependable.  A Colt wouldn't fire unless he squeezed that trigger just a little harder, with just the precise amount of pressure.

 

He was there.  A heartbeat away.  All he needed was an ounce or two more, just the slightest degree of pressure.

 

On the edge.

 

The steel that had saved his life—prolonged his life—almost a dozen times was a fraction of an inch from ending it.

 

He waited.

 

Sykes kept his finger on the trigger.  He let the barrel slide a touch further into his mouth.  He tasted a little more of the poisonous sulfur.

 

The edge.

 

2.

The first thing Sykes felt when he woke up was the revolver.

 

Heavy and cold.

 

Just as usual.

 

It was still in his hand, laid to rest across his lap.  After so many nights passed out with a gun in his hand, his arm had learned to do that.  Though half-asleep, he was rigid and upright, as though he’d fallen asleep in pose for a ferrotype.

 

The picture of a man who’d seen his best days gone.

 

His drink-swollen gut bulged out of a shirt that hadn’t fit in years, un-tucked from a pair of dirty black trousers.  Long, ragged hair hung over his ears and the back of his neck, sun-bleached and fading to gray.  Balding on top, any youthful pretense to vanity had faded with the years—a bartender had once described him to an inquiring posse as Ben Franklin with a droopy moustache and a permanent scowl.

 

The flavor of metal lingered on his tongue.  It spread to the roof of his mouth when he started to wiggle it.  Saliva mixed with gunpowder and steel residue.  That tincture used to sicken him in the mornings.  Not anymore.  Not after so many nights that ended the same way.

 

He wasn’t quite awake yet.  His eyelids slouched.  They closed down and drew back with every jerky motion of his head; rolling back to hit the cushion of the chair behind, then drooping forward until his chin bounced against his chest.

 

Sunlight filtered through the slow waltz of dust and the yellow-stained curtain sheers.  Every capillary in his eyes tingled; a thousand pinpricks that radiated across his face, colliding with the ripples that throbbed from his forehead.

 

And he had to piss, too.

 

It could wait.  It could all wait.  Just a few more minutes.  Everything ached.  His head.  His chest.  Even his goddamn balls itched.  The longer he could stay there, lost in the brain-fog between dreams and daylight, the less time he’d spend awake.  The less time he’d spend really hurting.

 

His gut growled.  Acid and Kentucky Bourbon gurgled up a slow, stuttered burp.  A wet fart followed.  The acrid, almost-meaty stink was what finally shook him out of the last throes of sleep.

 

That and the rapid-fire bang-bang-bang on the other side of his hotel room door.

 

“Sykes!” a voice echoed.  “Get the fuck out here!”

 

The oak planks of the door muted the shouting, but Sykes already knew who was on the other side.  When he shifted in his chair the coins jingled in his left pocket, money he’d all-but stolen from Turner Staplehurst a few hours before.

 

Turner “the Butcher” Staplehurst.

 

Sykes didn’t get up.  He farted again.  The door was unlocked.  In few seconds, even the dim-witted Yankee would realize that, and they’d be staring each other down again.

 

Last night all over.  Only this time without the cards or the poker table.  Or the whiskey clouding both of their eyes.

 

It took longer than Sykes expected, but the giant burst into the room a short while later, after spinning a web of profanity that did nothing to gain him access and everything to attract the attention of all the other guests at Horace McCann’s Inn & Saloon.

 

Not the least of the spectators was Mr. McCann himself, who had taken up position beside the Butcher on the second floor landing, despite his cane and his Fredericksburg-earned limp.  The calm demeanor of the proprietor had done nothing to dissuade Staplehurst from pressing his grievance against the door. 

 

Neither had he been able to entice his angry guest to allow him to mediate the prior night’s dispute.

 

Drool glistened across Staplehurst’s rakish goatee.  He hadn’t slept well or bothered to clean up.  His hair was still matted to his head in the outline of the bowler hat he had been wearing the evening before.  As soon as he got into Sykes’s room he renewed his diatribe.

 

“You took my money you fucking snake!” he shouted, spitting flecks of saliva.  “You hear me!  I want my fucking money and I want it fucking now!”

Sykes swallowed.  He cleared his throat and raised his eyes.  He said nothing.

 

Horace McCann hobbled behind Staplehurst.  He reached up with his knotted cane in a further attempt to bring the temperature down from a boil.

 

“Now I’ve told you before Mr. Staplehurst.  This man here’s not the one you should hold to account for the loss of your funds last evening,” he began.  “Not unless he put that pistol of his to your head and used the power of coercion to put those last six shots of whiskey into your belly.”

 

Staplehurst remained unreceptive.

 

“I told you to stay outta this, McCann.  This motherless asshole raised the ante to everything in my hand the moment he saw that the drink had got the best of me. 

Fair play my ass!”

 

Staplehurst’s forward progress had stopped with the entry of McCann, a nattily-dressed man in a frock coat who retained the pork-chop sideburns he’d grown in Ambrose Burnside’s Ninth Corps.

 

“No matter,” McCann replied.  “You take that risk when you sit down at the poker table.  You’d have done the same, if your places were switched.  I’ve seen it myself in case you’re of a mind to try telling me otherwise.”

 

Staplehurst only listened for a moment, before he pushed the saloon owner’s cane aside and pointed his dirty finger toward Sykes.

 

“You fucking swine!”  Staplehurst continued.  “I told you I want my money back!”

 

Sykes didn’t move.  His eyes had narrowed.  They were dead-locked on Staplehurst’s.

 

His reply was short.

 

“No.”

 

The simple refusal only incensed the northerner more.  Staplehurst swore again, cursing someone’s mother and offending his own marginal faith with a slur against the Virgin.  His right hand began to drift down toward the holster at his belt, and the Colt seated there.

 

Sykes didn’t move.  Or say another word.

 

Staplehurst snarled.  His fingers tensed.  His eyes narrowed.

 

That was enough to signal his intentions.

 

Sykes lifted his arm and fired.  One motion.  Two shots.  Fast as a diamondback.

Staplehurst lurched as the first ball tore through his right eye.  It drilled a path into his frontal lobe, exiting out of the back of his head in a red-gray geyser of skull splinters and slime.

 

The second round pounded his chest, driving broken sternum shards into his lungs as scalding lead ripped open his aorta.

 

Staplehurst was dead before his back hit the floorboards.

 

Sykes farted again.  Bowel-stink mixed with burnt gunpowder in his lungs.

 

Now he was awake.  And it was time to get out of town.