But then the choice was clearly his. And he did indeed mean that he couldn’t stand to swing. He would rather accept the alternative than the disgrace.
Longarm obliged the young fool with a bullet that hit him high in the throat and sprayed the hot stove with fresh blood. The blood sizzled and stank, filling the dugout with a sickening stench.
Longarm scarcely noticed. Jason Tyler was still alive. And Tyler’s hands were underneath his blankets where Longarm could not see what they might be busy doing.
The muzzle of the big Colt was aimed unwavering on a spot just about a half inch above the bridge of Tyler’s nose.
“God, don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, Marshal, please.”
“Stick your hands out from under those covers,” Longarm ordered.
Tyler’s hands appeared with a magician’s speed. They were empty. And shaking.
“Now kick the covers back.”
“Anything you say, Marshal, just please God don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
The smells of saltpeter and sulfur from the burnt gunpowder fought to overcome the equally strong stink of the scorched blood.
Longarm felt a mite queasy himself under those combined influences. And they were too much for Jason Tyler. The terrified cowboy puked all over the front of his long underwear. But he didn’t take his hands down even then.
“Why’d you kill her?” It was probably a stupid question. Shit-for-brains criminals virtually never told the truth. Not about hardly anything, including their own right names. But it was a question Longarm had to ask anyway.
“She … it was an accident, like.”
“An accident?” Longarm moved close behind Tyler, clamped one steel cuff onto Tyler’s left wrist, and jerked the arm down so it was held at the small of the cowboy’s back.
“We were on our way to town. For a drink, play a little poker, you know.”
“Uh, huh.” Longarm brought Tyler’s right hand down as well and snapped the other cuff in place, securing his hands behind him.
“We saw her coming toward us. Just walking slow and looking all around. Kind of … enjoying things. You know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“We’d about used up our pay already … a run of bad luck … but the last we went over to Norma’s place Billy’d had this Nancy, and he liked her real well. He said we all ought to have a go at her, so we stopped her and asked. She got all snotty with us. She said no, it was Sunday and she wasn’t working. If we wanted to fuck we could come to the whorehouse later on sometime and she’d give us whatever we wanted. Well, what we wanted was to have some pussy right then. And we didn’t like some little bitch whore like that saying no when Billy’d already fucked her once and she said herself she’d take us on another time. I mean, that made us mad. And Carl, he grabbed her first. I think it was him anyway. It was kind of like once we got started, we all got into the spirit of it.”
“Uh, huh,” Longarm said again, restraining an impulse to kick Tyler in the back of the head. It was easy to kill someone that way. Real easy.
“And we were right there close to Old Man Travis’s place and we knew he wasn’t home and … well, we dragged her in there. So nobody could hear her shouting, see. She was screaming her stupid head off. And it’s not like she was some damn virgin faced with a fate worse than death. She was a whore, for God’s sake. A lousy stinking whore. Where did she come off telling us we couldn’t have any.
“So anyhow, one thing led to another. We all of us screwed her. A couple times each, I guess. But she wouldn’t shut up. So Billy hit her, to get her to quiet down, like, so we could leave. But she wouldn’t leave it be. She was hollering crazy stuff, like how she was going to have the law on us for rape. Well, that was a laugh. We all knew better than that. But then she did a really dumb thing. She kicked Billy. Square in the balls. God, that pissed him off something awful. I mean, it would have made me that mad too. So he punched her. Just as hard as he could. And then he hit her again, and Carl hit her and Ronnie and … and I kicked and hit her some too. I mean, we all did. We just … forgot, kind of, what we were doing. And the next thing you know, she was dead. We hadn’t meant for her to be. Honest. It just … happened.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“We laid her out on the bunk, and Ronnie was the one that closed her eyes and folded her hands and tried to make her, like, presentable. Then Carl took her handbag. She had some money. We spent that, of course.”
“What did you do with the bag?” Longarm asked.
“We burned it. We didn’t want … you know.”
“Sure. Evidence.”
“That’s right. We didn’t want any evidence around. I think Ronnie kept the little coin purse she had with her. We shared the money, but he liked the coin purse. Said it would make a nice tobacco pouch. So he kept it. It’s, um, in the saddlebags under that bunk in the corner there.”
Longarm took a look. The coin purse was there, all right. Just as Tyler said, whatever money it had contained was gone by now. What the purse still held were a St. Christopher’s medal and a scrap of paper folded into a small wad and tied with a bit of string. Longarm untied the paper and spread it open: “IN CASE OF ACCIDENT PLEASE NOTIFY …”
“Come along, you piece of shit,” Longarm instructed.
“What about … you know?”
“Your buddies? Shit, I dunno. Maybe somebody will come along and bury them. Or maybe the buzzards and the raccoons will get to them first. I don’t much care either way.”
