Episode 37

The Killing Starts

There were no threats exchanged. No idle boasts of death-dealing skill. No insults. No promises of terrible violence to come. No one working up their nerve or getting their blood hot with words. There was none of that ginning up of courage that men intent on murder often engage in before the killing starts.

Joe cleared both holsters in the blink of an eye. His hands were empty and then they were full. And when they were full, they both spat fire. A man either side of Big Cal dropped to the floor. Cal threw himself back into the crowd of men, emptying his holsters as he fell.

Coolie turned his shotgun toward T.J. Bratt behind the bar. He bent to a crouch and let fly with both barrels. The double load took out one of the kegs holding the bar top up. It collapsed in a storm of wood shards and shattering glass. Bratt stumbled back into the racks of bottles, bringing up his own scatter gun.

Bear yanked the little redhead toward him by the wrist. Somehow, she broke free and tumbled to the floor.

Big Cal was rolling over the sand and sawdust seeking to hide under the roulette table. Joe followed him at a walk, blazing away with both pistols booming.

Bratt sent an answering charge of buckshot and tacks from this scattergun. Coolie leapt aside. A pair of drovers took the loads in the legs and fell screaming. Coolie rolled to his belly, revolver drawn and firing shots blind through the pall of white smoke and swirling sawdust.

Half the patrons of the Paradise fled through the tent flaps or crawled out under the canvas walls. The rest stayed either to see the rest of the show, too drunk to know better, or joined the fight on the side of their cowboy brothers. The air became alive with lead flying in every direction but mostly toward the pair of lawmen now separated by ten feet of open space.

Joe wheeled and gunned a man raising a rifle at Coolie’s back. He struck the man in the back of the head. The drover fell flopping, a new mouth open where his nose used to be. Coolie was up on his feet firing into the clouds of smoke toward the bar until his Remington went dry. A pair of drovers lay dead at his feet. Joe was at his side, tossing off his .32 into Coolie’s empty left hand. They were back-to-back now with the cowboys closing in a half ring about them. The shots were dying away now, the last going through the canvas above, fired without aim or caution by men too scared or too drunk to be any real good in a fight.

Spinning his Colt in his hand, Joe held the weapon by the barrel. The searing heat came through his leather glove. He laid about the heads of the encircling pack. They dropped as if poleaxed with each swing of his arm. He thought of Samson cracking Philistine skulls with the jawbone of an ass. Not much had changed since the days of the prophets. The men melted before him as they saw their brothers spilling to the floor with smashed noses and ruined mouths. Coolie moved with him, reloading his pistol and glaring into the smoky gloom.

“Joe, the girl,” Coolie said behind him.

Joe spared a glance to the floor before the bar. A tiny shape lay still there. A dark crimson stain spread across her once-fine embroidered dress of virginal white. He plied the butt of his Colt against the temple of a sneering drover with added fury and smiled as he felt the wet crunch of collapsing bone through the blue steel of the barrel in his fist.

A gasp and high squeal of feminine voices made Joe turn from his work. Adeline stood aghast before a phalanx of her sisters now crowded in the tent opening. Their eyes were locked on the fallen angel lying dead on the filthy barroom floor, never to sin again. Some of them wailed in terror. Others turned their heads away. Only Adeline remained cold-eyed and calm, the kind of calm Joe knew could turn to a sudden storm.

“Cover my back!” Joe called and crossed the Paradise in three strides to lay hands on Adeline and push her and her sisters back out onto the street. Coolie backed up toward the exit, his Remington turning back and forth to cover the remaining cowboys moving to follow.

He didn’t see Big Cal snake-crawl, unharmed, from under the roulette table with its heavy marble top fractured from .44 slugs.

Cal fired from a prone position lying on his belly, pistol trained on Coolie stepping backward through the flap. A slug took Coolie low in the gut, folding him over. A second punched through a thigh and the deputy buckled in the heap. A third, fired by Big Cal up on one knee now, split Coolie’s skull like a melon. The man dropped to the floor, lifeless but for one twitching boot gouging at the sand with its heel.