The Shotgun Arcana (48 page)

The masked man’s knee drove into her stomach and Constance staggered forward, knocked off-balance by the force of the blow and the pain. He grabbed her by her hair and pulled hard, yanking her off-balance again, pulling her to him. The ice pick gleamed in his hand and he moved it toward her face, near her eye, which was wide with fear.

“You’ve had some pugilistic training to be sure, girl. But you have a lot to learn about feints and getting too focused. You telegraphed your intentions to me, and I altered the dance … but that was very, very invigorating. Now I’m going to slide this into your eye and you will stop having all those bad thoughts and be a good girl for me.”

A gunshot rolled across the wasteland. The masked man’s shoulder exploded in a spray of blood and bone that spun him and Constance to the ground. Jim dropped off Promise and fell to the ground, his father’s smoking pistol dropping from his hands to fall in the dust with the boy.

“Got ya, you sumbitch,” Jim muttered as he crawled toward the two. Constance rolled free of the masked man and grabbed a rock. The masked man tried to rise, and fell again. His shoulder dribbled blood on the dry desert sand.

“More fight left in you than I anticipated … Deputy,” the masked man said, fumbling for his ice pick. “I hope you live long enough to see what Zeal does to your town, your friends and family.”

Constance smashed the rock over the man’s head. His mask, splintering and cracking, stopped part of the impact, but he still fell forward from the power of her blow.

“Little too focused there,” Constance said as she reared back to strike again. The masked man snarled under his broken mask and twisted to drive the ice pick into the girl’s chest. Jim growled and fell onto the masked man, punching him in his wounded shoulder. Jim ripped the ice pick out of his own thigh and stabbed the man in the back with it again and again. Constance grabbed the masked man’s wrist and slowed the ice pick the man was slashing toward her heart. It dug into her shoulder instead and ripped down toward her chest, but she fought it with every ounce of strength, snarling like a mountain lion. With her other hand she smashed the rock into the side of the man’s head again and again, with what remaining force she possessed. The man’s gaze was visible to her now through the yawning portals of the mask’s eyes—hatred, pure undiluted hatred.

The masked man coughed, a gurgling sound, and rich, dark blood spilled out from the narrow slit of a mouth on the mask. More poured out from below the chin of the broken wooden face.

“Damn you both to hell,” the man hissed. He slumped, rattled for a moment as his whole body convulsed, and then was still.

“You … are a hell of a fighter,” Jim said as he let go of the handle of the ice pick buried in the dead man’s back. He fell facefirst onto the sand and didn’t move.

“No, no, no!” Constance shouted. She scrambled across the dirt to Jim’s side. She rolled him over and searched for the signs of life in his throat and wrist, as her mother had taught her. The pulse as there, weak and erratic, but there. “Please, Jim, don’t leave me. This is all my fault, my damn dream! Please stay, fight for me, Jim Negrey, you hear, you fight!”

Constance tore off part of her already ripped and bloody shirt sleeve and applied it firmly to Jim’s spurting wound as a bandage. She pushed firmly on the pressure point on his leg where her mother taught her she could stop bleeding. The bag about Jim’s neck seemed to jump and move on its own. Constance chalked it up to a convulsion or her nerves playing tricks on her.

“Why did you lie to me back on Argent?” Jim muttered. “Two times. I counted.” His eyes fluttered open while Constance worked to stop the bleeding. She looked at him as she worked.

“You sure are pretty,” he said softly.

“And you are obviously delirious,” she said. “I tell you what, you stay with me and I’ll tell you everything. No more lies. We need to get you stabilized and then get off this road before more of these crazy people show up.”

“Thank you for saving Promise,” Jim said. “She’s all I got left.”

“She’s not all you got left,” Constance said, but Jim had already passed out again.

The Two of Swords

It was the night before Ray Zeal was to come to Golgotha, less than two days until Thanksgiving. The streets of Golgotha were an odd mixture of chaos and silence. Most decent folk were hunkering down for the coming storm and most of the people who were eager for Zeal and his people to sweep into town were celebrating wildly in the streets and the saloons.

Emily was packed and ready for tomorrow’s stage. She had wanted to depart today, but she had been informed at the Wells Fargo Station that the coach was way behind schedule, having not shown up at all yet. She was working on a painting in her suite at the Imperial when there was a knock at the door. She sat down her brush, wiped her hands with her oilcloth, covered the canvas and opened the door. It was her father.

“May I please come in?” Bick said.

“Yes,” Emily replied. “Of course.” He entered and sat on the sofa, across from the chair Emily chose.

“I understand you are leaving on the next stage,” Bick said. Emily nodded. “That is a very wise decision. I’d like you to be gone from Golgotha before Zeal comes back tomorrow.”

“You should leave as well,” Emily said. “He seemed a most brutal and unstable man on the street the other day.”

“He’s not a man,” Bick said. “He’s like me.”

Emily’s eyes widened.

“But he’s so…,” Emily said. “You have to get out of here. I heard what he did to you. He’ll kill you!”

“I thought you might want him to,” Bick said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want that. I’d never want that.”

“I wanted to … apologize to you,” Bick said. “I know apology is a next-to-worthless currency, but I wanted you to know about your mother.

“Your mother restored my faith in my mission, my purpose for being here. Even if angels can fall, can fail, even if God is silent, humanity deserves its time on the stage, its spotlight. I may never see Heaven again, may forget every detail of it, but I can look at your mother’s paintings, remember them and be reminded of my lost home. That finite creatures of dust and mud, born to oblivion, can summon forth such beauty, such transcendent emotions and ideas … that is worth protecting, worth fighting for, worth dying for.”

“If you loved her so much, why did you leave her alone?” Emily said. “You knew she was going to die if she had me. Her family hated her for her affair with you, treated her like trash. They hated me, too, sent me away to the orphanage when she died. I don’t understand. How can you claim to love her so much and treat her like that? Let her die alone and disgraced.”

“My kind experience emotions very strongly, very powerfully,” Bick said. “I fell completely in love with your mother and a part of me belongs to her forever. It is the same each time we fall in love or hate, it is part of how we are made, it is how we can hold to our purposes or missions as long as we do. We, for lack of a better term, obsess.

“Your mother loved me, too, and we were very happy for a time. I was with your mother for almost a year. I wanted to be with her forever.”

“Then why?” Emily said. “She deserves an answer. I do too.”

“The truth,” Bick said. “Our sorrow fills us up as deeply as any other emotion we experience. I couldn’t bear the thought of watching her die, couldn’t stand the thought of the sadness and the pain. I was a coward, an evil, weak, selfish coward, and I ran away rather than stand witness to the destruction my actions caused. I abandoned her, I abandoned you.

“I wept for your mother. Truth be told, I wept for me as well, my loss as much as her death. I wish I could say I wept for you and your loss, but I didn’t. For all the tales of guardian angels, my kind makes terrible parents. I should have done for you. I didn’t. I turned to building my empire here, to burying myself in the role of Malachi Bick, ruthless scoundrel, so I could ignore the pain.”

“Did it work?” she asked.

“No,” Bick said. “It didn’t.”

“When I was in the orphanage, I remember for a long time, I cried every night. I prayed to die, to be taken out of this world. One day I realized God wasn’t going to kill me, he wasn’t going to end my suffering. I decided that night, I could do the job myself or I could try to see what this life had for me, good and bad. I decided to stay and in time I stopped crying. I understand how you must have felt. I’m sorry. It’s the worst feeling in the world to feel alone all the time.”

“You forgive me?” Bick said.

Emily nodded.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I love you.”

Bick looked at this tiny girl, more human than divine, but her words, her words her soul touched the rocky, barren place in him. It reminded him of a place before time, a voice that he could barely recall that made all the chaos and confusion and doubt make sense.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Bick said, nodding, smiling. “I have a present for you.”

“Really?” Emily said. Bick nodded. He opened his coat and withdrew a single black feather, straight and perfect. The color of the feather was black as coal, gently fading to a soft smoky gray at the edge of the feather.

“This is mine,” Bick said. “It is part of me, a very old part. With this you can always find me and I can always find you.”

Bick placed the feather in her hand.

“I freely give you this, and with it you may request anything of me, anything, Emily. You tell me to go away, I will leave; you tell me to die, and I will die. This is part of me, the core of who I am, and I share it with you, because you are my daughter and I love you with all I am.”

“Are you sure you want me to have this?” she said.

“I trust you with my life,” Bick said. “Just as I trusted Caleb. I have only given a few of these away in my long existence. We trust as powerfully as we distrust. It is the way of my kind. Of late, I have allowed my distrust to poison me, but you, you have shown me a grace I had forgotten existed.”

“Thank you,” Emily said. “I’ll keep it safe, I promise. I have a present for you, now.” She stood, as did Bick, and walked to the covered canvas. She pulled the cloth away.

“It’s not finished, but I think you should see it.”

Bick gasped and stood transfixed by the image. It was an angel high aloft with spread wings and a fluttering mane of hair like midnight that bled into the dark, threatening storm clouds that swirled about him. At the core of the storm, the rays of the sun spilled out, obscuring his face, but Bick knew exactly what that face looked like. The painting sang to him, scolded him, it was full of love and anger, joy and regret. The emotions swelled and crashed over him, like ocean waves. He was naked before this mirror. Bick’s eyes welled with tears and he nodded .

“How … did you?” Bick tried to pull his eyes away from the painting. “It’s me. All of me, even the parts I can’t look at or admit.”

“I’ve been able to do it since I was a little girl,” Emily said. “When I see someone, and draw them, or paint them, I can see all of them. It’s like I’m painting their soul as well, all the colors and the hues, the depths and shading.”

“Emily,” Bick said, “angels don’t have souls.”

“I disagree,” she said, and covered the painting again.

Bick stood and wiped his eyes.

“That is beautiful and very flattering,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I paint what I see,” Emily said. “Don’t really have a choice in it. Look, I don’t want you to die and I don’t want Zeal to hurt you or anyone else. You have to get out of here, now, Daddy.”

“Daddy.” Bick smiled. “I like that.”

“Please go,” she said.

“I can’t,” he said. “If you painted me and saw what’s inside of me, you should understand why.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I saw you hate this place and love it too.”

“True,” Bick said. “I have a job to do. Zeal may not win yet. I have a plan. I’ll tell you all about it. If things go very bad and you can’t get away, I can tell you a secret that will lay Zeal low, but it’s a dangerous gambit and only to be used if all else has failed.”

“Let me stay and help,” Emily said. “You’d count on Caleb, count on me!”

“Caleb is dead,” Bick said. “And it was because of me. I can’t bear the thought of losing you too. I want you on the next stagecoach out of here, Emily. Promise me.”

“Only if you promise me I can come back and stay,” she said. “You may have done things, questionable things, but you are my father and you are all I have in this world. I’ve seen all the colors in you, remember? There is still more light in you than darkness, Daddy. Don’t let Zeal or anyone else take that away from you, or from me.”

Emily hugged him tight. He held her, too, as gently as a spring rain with arms capable of ripping apart worlds. For a moment, Bick remembered this feeling from long ago before there was time or space or Earth. He remembered his home in the arms of his child.

“I promise,” Bick said.

*   *   *

Harry Pratt answered the insistent pounding at his door in the dead of night. He had not yet been to bed. Mutt stood there. He was not wearing his star and he had a canvas bag hung over his shoulder and a Winchester rifle in his hand.

“What is it?” Harry said. “Zeal here? Jon all right?”

“I don’t have much time to explain, Harry,” Mutt said, “but if Zeal gets his hands on this skull”—he held up the bag—“it’s real bad. He’ll wreck the town and then keep going.”

“What the hell is it?” Harry said.

“Trouble,” Mutt said. “Golgotha-style trouble.”

“Why me?” Harry said.

“Because you are the last person in the world anyone would expect me to trust with anything,” Mutt said.

“True enough,” Pratt said.

“No one will expect you to have it and it has to be kept safe or a lot of people are going to die, and I know you will do your best to keep that from happening, Harry.”

“Give me the bag,” Pratt said. Mutt handed it to him.

“Be careful,” Mutt said. “Zeal’s got people all over. They might come for you to get some leverage.”

“Let them,” Harry said. “I’ll hide this and then go meet up with Jon, I can help him.”