Gates David Edgerley

Blood Money

David Edgerley Gates

Blood money

* * *

Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money to turn down.

Colonel Benét found the bounty hunter overscrupulous.

“Simple justice,” the colonel said. “An eye for an eye.”

“You don’t appear to be looking for justice,” Placido Geist told him. “You’re soliciting murder for hire.”

“I didn’t realize your principles were so inelastic.”

“My principles are elastic enough, but my neck isn’t,” the bounty hunter said. “What you’re asking me to do would get me a brief drop on a short rope.”

“I want recompense.”

“You want retribution.”

“Call it what you will,” the colonel said stiffly.

“I call it nothing I want a part of.”

“Are you all that squeamish? Your reputation would suggest otherwise.”

“My reputation isn’t something I’m required to inhabit with the understanding that it invites insult,” Placido Geist said.

“I doubted you’d accept the commission,” Lockjaw Lamar told him.

* * *

“And then some,” the bounty hunter snorted.

The judge smiled. “You don’t sound very taken with Colonel Benét.”

“I understand he’s suffered a bitter loss, but the solution is out of line with his injury.”

“His only son dead and any hope for a grandchild lost?”

“You’re acting Devil’s Advocate.”

“A role that singles me out, often enough.”

The bounty hunter smiled as well. The two men had met during a charged political inquiry that resulted in damage to a good many reputations and elevated others less deserving.

“The argument, if I might label it so,” the judge said, “is that Colonel Benét requires a blood price be paid.”

“He’s not entitled to it.”

“The man got your back up, I see.”

“It’s one thing to contemplate revenge,” Placido Geist said to the judge. “I know I have.”

The judge had been a party to it too, and chose to let the bounty hunter’s remark pass.

“It’s another thing entirely to compass a homicide.”

“Conspiracy to commit a killing is felony murder. Unless you could contrive to make it appear otherwise, an assassination cloaked as, say, self-defense.”

“Well, that’s what he thought he was paying for. Which, on balance, is why I found him offensive,” the bounty hunter said.

“That he’d hire it done.”

“And seek to avoid penalty. It’s a coward’s choice.”

“You think he should gun the man himself and face whatever consequences afterwards?”

“It would be a damn sight more honest, and honorable.”

“Maybe honorable doesn’t enter into it,” the judge said.

“But he wants his name attached to the business, that’s the point. Not whispered about. Spoken of. An open secret.”

“Not probative. A rumor doesn’t invite indictment.”

“No, but it intimidates. Colonel Benét wants his fiat, his whim, made corporal.”

“To demonstrate his reach.”

“I’d suggest it was a demonstration of his own vanity.”

“To have this man — what’s his name, Emory? — put down like a dog that kills chickens, simply because he can.”

They agreed, then, on the moral point. It was the shoal water of particular incident they’d run aground in. And it was to be admitted that Colonel Benét had in fact suffered an irredeemable injury. It was also pretty much agreed that what had happened was simple bad luck: Nathan Benét, the colonel’s son and heir, the repository of his dynastic ambitions, had been the unhappy victim of another man’s carelessness, or stupidity, but the inquest ruled it accidental death, and no charge of manslaughter was filed. Set at liberty, the man Colonel Benét held responsible promptly departed the immediate environs, sensibly assuming Texas law could be bought, and was reported to be presently at large in the Bootheel of New Mexico.

The facts were these. A woman named Magdalena Benavidez maintained a house of ill repute in Del Valle, just south of the capital. It was much frequented by state legislators, and she enjoyed the protection of both the Austin city police and Travis County sheriff’s deputies. On the afternoon in question, the man later identified as Kick Emory was disporting himself in one of the upper front rooms. Kick was an itinerant, not exactly a bum, but someone who put his hand to what he found, whether it were carpentry or cowpunching, and it happened he found himself flush with money that week in Austin. He spent most of the week at Magdalena’s cathouse, favoring one girl over the others, a red-headed Anglo who called herself Philadelphia Sinclair and claimed to be from back East. In truth, her name was Jemmie Dart, she’d been a whore for all her grown life, and she’d never been east of Kansas.

Why, might we ask, did Nathan Benét also happen to be frequenting a whorehouse on the afternoon in dispute? It was a question his father seemed unlikely or unwilling to address. Nathan was recently married; his wife was in fact now pregnant with their first child; he had nothing to answer for and had everything to look forward to. Let’s say simply that a man of his background, with his responsibilities — and his father’s expectations — found it easier, or somehow simpler, to get his pipe smoked without consequences. It was certainly common enough, and Magdalena’s was exactly the place you’d go, discreet if openly talked of (in male company), flagrant behavior kept private, transactions to be negotiated, anything to be had for a price.

This, then, was the concatenation of circumstance.

Kick Emory caromed off the roof of the veranda in a shower of glass, thrown out the window of Jemmie Dart’s room by one of Magdalena’s bouncers. Violence offered the whore, perhaps, or merely underpayment, but later inquiries made it unclear. He then slid off the roof of the veranda and fell on Nathan Benét.

Kick was unhurt, if bruised and embarrassed. Nathan’s neck was broken. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure; a man in his underclothes wasn’t an instrument of murder. The problem was compounded by both the personal and the political: The colonel’s boy couldn’t be dead of stupidity.

There was more than enough blame to go around, and further accident, or unhappiness. The colonel’s daughter-in-law lost her child, and the colonel was denied the fruit of his son’s seed. Magdalena Benavidez and her establishment were too well protected for the colonel to attack in person, but the whore Jemmie Dart disappeared, perhaps returning to the family she’d sometimes spoken of. More likely she was sold into the cribs of El Paso, and from there across the river. The bouncer was found dead in an irrigation ditch, drowned in two inches of water and alleged to be drunk at the time.

Such a series of mischance didn’t go unnoticed.

“He’s stalking them,” Placido Geist said.

“Anybody involved with his son’s death, culpable or no.”

“They’re all culpable, in his view.”

“I take your point,” Lamar said. He could see the bounty hunter was wrestling with himself, but the judge wasn’t someone who’d intrude on another man’s internal struggle. He understood well enough how your gut could tighten with anger or guilt.

“Damn the man,” Placido Geist said. He meant Benét.

Not that Kick Emory was any prize himself. He’d been in and out of scrapes for all his adult life, short though it was to date, and had done time in Kansas for manslaughter. There was, therefore, some logic in the colonel’s demand that Kick be held accountable, as the world at large might best be rid of him and his skills at courting trouble.

But this was an abstraction and an excuse, Placido Geist argued, not the situation as it obtained on the ground. If there were a greater social good in Kick Emory’s demise, Colonel Benét was using it to mask a personal vendetta.

“He wouldn’t be the first,” Lamar said.

“No, nor will he be the last, but a better man would own up to the fact that his motives weren’t pure.”

“Absolute moral certainty is always suspect,” Lamar agreed.

“What happened last month over in Dime Box?”

“Oh, hell,” the bounty hunter said, looking awkward. “That was a sorry piece of work, I’d be the first to admit.”

“And now the shoe’s on the other foot.”

“When did I hire you to be my conscience?”

Lamar looked at him over the rims of his spectacles. It was a gaze he’d practiced when he was still active on the bench, and it signified that the judge wasn’t to be trifled with.

The incident he was referring to did Placido Geist little credit. He’d killed a man based on circumstantial evidence — no more than his instinct and experience. That he’d been right to do so, his instinct and experience being more than most men’s, cut little ice with the young man’s father, Farragut Hagerty, a rancher of no small influence in East Texas*. Placido Geist felt scant remorse, but the matter was proving troublesome.

[Footnote: * See”The Cottonwoods,”AHMM, October 2006.]

“I hear old man Hagerty’s put up bounty money for you,” the judge said.

“I hear the same,” Placido Geist admitted.

“You kill a man’s son, and he puts a price on your head. Kick Emory kills a man’s son, and that man puts a price on his.”

“You don’t appreciate the distinction,” Placido Geist replied tartly. “Kick Emory fell off a whorehouse roof. Derek Hagerty threw down on me and I defended myself.”

This was shading the truth, some. He’d in fact goaded the Hagerty kid into gunplay. He knew Derek Hagerty to be complicit in a lynching, but having no proof, served up his own equity.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” the judge retorted, “any fair-minded observer would remark the similarities. Two men’s sons are dead. Both of those men have money and political connections. Both of those men seek an accounting. Both of those men have a quarry in their sights.” The judge took a deep breath, stifling his impatience with an old friend. “I’m not comparing you with Kick Emory,” he said. “I’m simply suggesting that you have a motive as transparent as Colonel Benét’s.”

“Which is?”

“You don’t want to see Emory’s death bought and paid for.”

“Somebody has to catch him first.”

“But it won’t be you, by your own choice.”

“Benét will hire another man.”

“He won’t hire a better.”

“That remains to be seen,” Placido Geist said. “Any number of men will hunt their own kind if the price is right.”

The judge had a sudden presentiment. He realized he should have seen it from the start. “You intend to find Emory first.”

“I intend to beat Colonel Benét to his prize, yes.”

The judge shook his head. “If this weren’t fast becoming a farce, it would soon be tragedy,” he said.

“No,” Placido Geist told him. “A tragedy, defined, is the drama of a man brought low by a flaw in his own character. This may be an unhappy or an unfortunate circumstance, an accident waiting to happen, perhaps, but by no sensible measure can it be misnamed a tragedy.”

The judge didn’t answer. Tragedy, he also well knew, turns on fated moments. If so, the question then was whose.

* * *

In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase relocated the border of the United States, moving it some sixty miles south of the Gila River to its present-day boundary with Chihuahua and Sonora. This negotiation might be characterized as a conciliatory gesture to Mexico, which had lost all of California and what was now the American Southwest five years before that, in a war of adventure still bitterly resented. For a price of ten million dollars, about 45,000 square miles changed hands; most of it wound up in what was now Arizona, the tag-end left over for New Mexico. The shape of this arbitrary line on a map, falling just below the Thirty-Second Parallel, was geometric: It followed none of the natural contours of the land, and in New Mexico it was known as the Bootheel.West of El Paso, the main Southern Pacific route cut up toward Deming. The rail line along the border was a feeder road for livestock and local freight, stop-and-go, twice weekly.

Placido Geist chose to go saddleback on a hired mount and tack. The buckskin gelding was a damn decent horse, he discovered, after making fifty miles the first day, which was asking a little much from both man and animal. They got to Columbus just as the light was failing.

Columbus, New Mexico, was the site of a cross-border raid by Pancho Villa’s guerrilla troops in 1916, two years previous. Placido Geist dismounted in front of the shuttered railway station. The depot clock had stopped a bullet that March morning of Villa’s attack. Its inner workings were jammed fast, the hands stuck at 4:20 A.M.

The bounty hunter went to find a place to stay, for himself a bath, if possible, and for the horse, grain and a rubdown.

He pushed on the next day.

The country was hard, unwatered, a desert landscape. Towns were few. He was making for Antelope Wells, a border crossing. Word had it that Kick Emory was holed up there. But if word had it, Placido Geist wouldn’t be the only one who’d heard.

They made another forty miles. The buckskin was game enough. The bounty hunter knew he wasn’t doing the horse any favors, though. Placido Geist wouldn’t last much longer than a dead horse. He camped on the trail, resting the gelding that night and walking him the best part of the following day before turning due south to cross the Hatchets. Antelope Wells was situated about halfway between the Alamo Hueco and the Continental Divide. It was another two days’ ride to the border. He had to conserve the horse’s energies, as well as his own, but he imagined time was already against him.

* * *

The town numbered no more than four hundred residents, although on market days it probably drew some itinerant custom. The buildings were by and large of one story, mud-plastered adobe or sod, there being little in the way of indigenous timber for framing lumber or planking. Although it was styled a Port of Entry on the ordnance maps, there was no sister settlement across the border, probably because there was no river between and no viable water source. Antelope Wells was orphaned, an accident not of geography but of the Gadsden Treaty. It had no good reason for being there.

There was, however, a telegraph office, the twentieth century gaining ground, and an Army garrison, manned at less than company strength, perhaps forty officers and men, all told, detailed to patrol a trackless stretch of border that invited casual depredations, given the unruly state of the insurgency in Mexico. The largest establishment in Antelope Wells called itself the Longhorn, a saloon with gaming tables, the few whores drawing most of their idle custom from the cavalry post.

It was the only place to rent a room. It was also where Placido Geist expected to find the man Emory, although why Emory would choose this flyblown outpost was a puzzle. The place to lose yourself was somewhere well trafficked, busy with nameless transients, both opportunists and their prey, not some town on the edge of nowhere where you couldn’t go unnoticed. But perhaps Emory had confused isolation with secrecy, an easy mistake.

The bounty hunter was to realize his own mistake early that evening.

* * *

He took note of the man first thing, of course. There was an easy physical confidence, the mark of a practiced gunhawk. Not a swagger, more of a completeness, absolutely aware of the immediate environment. He’d come in through the back, where the whores had their cribs, but he didn’t have the look of a man dulled by recent and hurried sex. He had more the sleepy aspect of a tiger pretending to ignore a staked goat.

Placido Geist was seated at one of the vacant blackjack tables. There had been no other place to sit. He’d waved away both of the girls who’d offered him company, had eaten a not unacceptable steak, gristly but flavorful, if overcooked, and he was sipping a weak coffee with a whiskey chaser.

The man who’d come in through the back walked over to the table. He was a compact sort, of medium height, the kind of man likely to be very quick, Placido Geist calculated.

“Straw’s my name. I believe I know yours.”

Placido Geist nodded. They’d never met, but Simon Straw had killed sixteen men, to the bounty hunter’s knowledge, in the Texas Panhandle and in Oklahoma. He was as good as they came. Both of them were out of their usual territory, but they were on all too familiar territory with each other.

“I believe we have a bone to pick,” Straw said.

Placido Geist had himself unhurriedly surveyed the near environs, casting about for a second shooter, but had seen none. This appeared to be a straightforward transaction, man to man. “I believe we may have an argument,” he conceded. “And one I’d prefer to avoid. You’re here for Kick Emory, if I don’t miss my guess. I’ve come to prevent your killing him.”

Simon Straw smiled. It was a disarming smile, almost apologetic. It wasn’t meant to give insult. “I’m not here for that ranny,” he said. “I’m here for you, Espectro.” His stance was relaxed, practically nerveless, none of his muscles tensed.

His hands were at his sides, the elbows slightly bent, like a man ready to pick up a glass. His gun was worn high on the hip, a.44 Remington single-action.

“Kick Emory is worth fifty thousand dollars to Nathan Benét’s father,” Placido Geist said. “I can’t be worth the time and energy.”

“You’d be worth it to me,” Straw said.

He should have seen it before, he now saw. “How much money has Farragut Hagerty put up for me?” he asked.

Simon Straw shrugged. “Twenty-five thousand,” he said.

“The price for the cowboy’s twice that.”

“Kick Emory’s holed up on the Hagerty place back in Texas,” Straw said. “He’s nowhere near New Mexico.”

“Old man Hagerty’s giving sanctuary to Emory from Colonel Benét,” Placido Geist said, snapping to it at the last, if a little late. “And this entire fool’s errand has been meant only to draw me out.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Straw said.

To die in some backwater where there was no law to stop it. It wasn’t Kick Emory who’d picked this place.

“Let’s step out into the street,” Straw said.

“Why bother?” Placido Geist asked him.

“I’ll take small credit for shooting a man with a napkin in his lap.”

“You want a fair fight,” Placido Geist said. “You want we should stand up to each other. You want it known you could take me. And your reward is my celebrity, not Hagerty’s money.”

“I don’t care about the money, old man. I want it said I went up against you, and we took the ten paces, and shot it out. God’s truth, I’d admire your scalp on my belt.”

“It’s a dubious eminence, Straw,” Placido Geist said.

“Fine words butter no parsnips.”

“Make your play,” Placido Geist told him.

He was indeed very fast, and almost fast enough. His left hand moved across his body as he drew the gun with his right, so the heel of his left hand cocked the hammer.

Placido Geist shot him through the table with the nine-inch Smith he’d been holding under his napkin, the bullet splintering up through the felt, taking Straw in the chest. He went down in a burst of tissue and bone.

Straw’s own bullet had nicked the bounty hunter’s earlobe. Placido Geist stepped out from behind the table and put his foot on Straw’s wrist.

“Damn,” Straw said, looking up, his breath a whisper in his shattered lungs. “You’ve done for me.”

“They couldn’t have sent a better,” Placido Geist said.

Air bubbled on Straw’s lips. “I found my better,” he said. He coughed, wetly, and choked to death on his own blood.

Placido Geist touched the napkin to his ear.

Fine words butter no parsnips. The bounty hunter regretted having to kill a literate man.

* * *

Other than the Army, there was no law in Antelope Wells, and he chose not to wait for things to sort themselves out. He rode the gelding north to Deming, three full days, where he could catch a through train, and they traveled to Texas by rail, the buckskin riding in the freight wagons, his job done. Placido Geist had left a job half done, but now he had to see it through to the finish.

He was going to settle with the Hagertys. The fated moment awaited him, and he would no longer avoid it.

* * *

Emile Duquesne wasn’t overly glad to see him again. The sheriff of Dime Box knew trouble when it came courting.

“The last time you passed through, there were coffins made. Is this getting to be a habit?”

“Hagerty sent a man to kill me.”

“He’ll send others.”

“Not if there’s no one left alive to pay my bounty.”

Duquesne studied the old manhunter. His hands rested on his desk, and he was careful to leave them there. “That sounds much like an offer of violence to Farragut Hagerty’s person,” he remarked. “I’ve no grounds to arrest you, as yet. And there’s no doubt in my mind that should I attempt such an arrest, you’d spill my brains before my gun cleared leather.”

“I’d be unhappy to see it come to that,” Placido Geist said.

“So would I, and I’d be on the unhappy end of it.”

“What are the odds I can parley with Hagerty?”

“Slim to none,” the sheriff said. “Your best chance of a negotiation would be to kill him, and then his oldest son Peter, and then you’d have no choice but to kill me as well.”

“You wouldn’t let it rest there.”

“Couldn’t,” Duquesne told him.

“Because you’re in Hagerty’s pocket.”

“What difference does that make if he’s dead? Besides, he might have bought the gun, but he can’t buy the badge. I signed on for an honest day’s work, half a lifetime ago.”

“Time you earned your pay,” Placido Geist said.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars, if I shoot you in the back,” the sheriff said.

“I won’t leave you to cover my back, then.”

“Ah, hell,” Duquesne said, pushing to his feet. “Somebody has to.”

“No need for it to be you,” the bounty hunter said.

“No need,” Duquesne agreed. “Other than mine.”

* * *

They rode out to the Hagerty spread together. Duquesne sat a roan. Placido Geist was riding his claybank mare. “That’s an ugly damn hammer-headed horse,” Duquesne remarked. Placido Geist said nothing. Duquesne wasn’t the first to comment on the mare’s appearance.

“Must be like having an ugly wife,” Duquesne said. “Nobody wants to steal her.”

He was making conversation to cover his anxiety, the bounty hunter understood.

“It’s said you’ve killed over forty men,” the sheriff said.

“Near enough,” Placido Geist said.

“You remember them all?” Duquesne asked.

“Every one,” the bounty hunter said.

“Not something you forget, I’d imagine. Like the women you chose to sleep with.”

“Some of those women have slipped my mind.”

Duquesne sniffed. “Not mine,” he said.

“Fifty-six,” Placido Geist said.

Duquesne knew it wasn’t women the old man was keeping score of, but the number of graves the bounty hunter had filled.

“I don’t take pride in it,” Placido Geist told him.

“But you’re alive.”

Placido Geist nodded to himself. “There’s that,” he said.

Duquesne fell silent. The two men rode the rest of the way without talking.

They walked their horses in through the corrals and drew up in front of the main house. Neither of them dismounted. A few Hagerty hands were on the porch. A few more gathered, curious as to what might be about to happen. Placido Geist and Duquesne sat their horses, waiting for it as well.

“What’s your object?” the sheriff asked him.

“Not to get killed, or you either,” the bounty hunter said. “Nor to kill any innocents.”

Duquesne had a twelve-gauge scattergun resting across the pommel of his saddle, a holstered.45 on his hip. “We’ll see how that works out,” he said. “Let’s hope they’re respectful of the office of the law.”

A tall man, weathered but only in his late twenties or early thirties, stepped out onto the porch and looked at the two men on horseback. There was nothing friendly in his gaze. His look was in fact more hostile toward the sheriff than toward the bounty hunter. His name was Peter Hagerty.

“You know me,” Placido Geist said. “I killed your brother. And you’re also well aware he invited it.”

The tall man moved forward out of the shadow of the porch overhang and into the sunlight at the top of steps. “He was a boy,” he said, his words rusty. “He chased whores, he was unlucky at cards, he couldn’t break a horse, he didn’t have the stomach to brand a calf. I’ve looked out for him since he was three years old. He was a featherweight. I knew that, but I cared about that kid. And when you shot him down in the streets of Dime Box, you were too quick for me then to stop it.”

“I’m too quick for you now, son,” Placido Geist said.

“You’re a murderer,” Peter Hagerty said. “And you,” he said to Duquesne, “you stood by and let it happen, and you stand by now.”

“Not quite the same,” the sheriff said. “I stood by then so as not to see you dead alongside your brother. I’m here now to back this man up. There’s enough fault to go around.”

Peter glanced away. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Yes, it does,” Duquesne said. “Your father put a price on this man’s head.”

“This man answers for what he did,” Peter Hagerty said.

“I’d rather answer for what I haven’t done,” Placido Geist said mildly, and both Peter Hagerty and the sheriff looked at him in surprise. “For my failure of nerve, for not speaking up, for lacking courage, for never being bold enough with women.”

Hagerty and Duquesne stared at him.

“We deserve to be told the truth, all of us,” Placido Geist said. “Me included.” He dismounted, letting the reins trail.

He was a short, stocky half-breed. Peter Hagerty, standing tall on the porch, overtopped him by a good three feet.

“Your brother was a boy, yes,” Placido Geist went on. “He was a rotten boy, a spoiled boy, and sooner or later he would have gotten what was coming to him. I’m sorry it had to be me, but it would have been somebody. You’re welcome to try and kill me, if that gives recompense.”

The bounty hunter took off his sombrero and scaled it onto the ground. “I’ve hunted men, but I won’t be hunted,” he said to Peter Hagerty. “Your father offered any and all comers a bounty of twenty-five thousand dollars to whoever killed me. Is he ready and able to do it himself?”

Peter turned abruptly and went into the house.

Duquesne, sitting his saddle, blew out his breath. “You’re trying a man’s patience,” he remarked to the bounty hunter.

The old man nodded. “This family is trying mine,” he said. “They want a reckoning. I want a night’s rest.”

“At what cost?” Duquesne asked him.

“Whatever the market will bear,” Placido Geist said.

Duquesne wasn’t about to cross him. He’d known men who could be placated, or persuaded. The bounty hunter was obdurate as stone.

They brought Farragut Hagerty out onto the porch, carrying him in a bentwood rocker, his son Peter taking half his father’s weight, and a Chinaman in a cook’s apron taking the other half. They were like pallbearers. Old man Hagerty had an Indian blanket thrown around his shoulders, the folds bunched in his lap, his hands beneath the blanket. Placido Geist thought about the gun he’d had under his napkin when he shot Simon Straw.

But there was no life in Hagerty’s limbs. He had barely the strength to sit upright. One side of his face was knotted and frozen, the skin tight enough to burst, the other side lazy and drooping. His mouth was crooked, slack with drool. Placido Geist knew him for the victim of stroke. Hagerty’s eyes were still alive, though, filled with fury and resentment, the look of a man insulted, an insult he was helpless to revenge. His very flesh had failed him, and his anger at this final indignity burned hot enough to make his waxy skin glow from within.

He stared at Placido Geist. “This man should hang,” he said. His voice was papery. The bounty hunter was surprised he still had the power of speech. “Hang,” he rasped.

Peter Hagerty looked up at Duquesne, still on horseback. “We’ve got rope,” he said. “And enough men to see justice done. Are you thinking to stop it?”

“Let’s talk about hanging,” the sheriff said. “Your baby brother persuaded a couple of your cowhands to lynch a kid who’d crossed him over a whore.”

“You heard that from the whore,” Peter said.

“I heard that from the whore,” Placido Geist corrected him. “You know it to be true. So does every man standing here.”

“Every man standing here works for my father,” Peter said.

“You know damn well I’ll take the gun over the rope,” the bounty hunter said. “And this bunch can kill me, of that I have no doubt, if it comes to that, but I’ll drop a good five of them first, and you’ll be the first one to fall.”

“Hang him,” the old man growled. Spit was running down his chin. He vibrated with palsy.

“You’re never going to be the man your father was, Peter,” Placido Geist said. “Maybe you can be a better one. He requires an injury to be redeemed, but this isn’t your grief. I shot your brother dead. He was a boy who needed killing.”

“You can’t ask this of me,” Peter Hagerty said.

“I can ask,” the bounty hunter said. “You live with your choices. You can keep faith with a dead man, or a dying one, or you can choose to accept different results.”

“He was my brother, damn you.”

“He was a ne’er-do-well. You have it in you to be the man your father expects. You have it in you to be the man you might expect of yourself. You’re assuming too great a burden.”

“You’re talking to stay alive.”

“I’m talking to keep you alive, boy,” Placido Geist told him. “I’d regret having to kill you, but regret won’t get in my way if you force my hand.”

“Hang him,” old man Hagerty whispered furiously. The violence of his inner thoughts seemed the only thing sustaining him, his life suspended on a thread, like the thread of saliva suspended from the corner of his mouth, silvery as a cobweb and nearly as insubstantial.

“What’s it going to be?” Placido Geist asked Peter Hagerty.

“Your father’s anger will haunt you, either way you choose.”

“Aw, piss on it,” Peter muttered, defeated.

In the charged silence, the sound of the lever gun being cocked was as crisp as a coin dropping on a marble bar. None of the men turned, careful not to break their brittle truce.

“These people sheltered me,” the kid holding the Winchester ‘94 said. “I owe them for that kindness.”

Duquesne glanced over his shoulder, not shifting his weight or altering his posture. “And who might you be?” he asked.

“He’d be Kick Emory,” Placido Geist said.

“That would be me,” Emory acknowledged.

“This is the man a certain Colonel Benét holds responsible for the death of his son Nathan,” the bounty hunter explained to Duquesne. “The colonel put money on his head.”

“Not that you’ll ever collect,” Emory said.

“Never meant to,” Placido Geist said. “I found the colonel distasteful. I turned his money down.”

“Wasn’t it enough?”

“I’ve no interest in you,” Placido Geist said. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re no longer worth saving.”

“You’ve got too much mouth,” Emory said, moving a little to the right for a clean shot at the bounty hunter.

Duquesne stood in the stirrups and made a quick half turn with his upper body, bringing the twelve-gauge to bear, and blew Kick Emory’s belly through his backbone.

* * *

“Will they lift the reward?”

“That’s up to Peter Hagerty.” Placido Geist shrugged, tightening the saddle cinches. “I don’t see him following in his father’s footsteps. You thought he wouldn’t bargain, but we came to an accommodation.”

“He might not forgive you for shaming him,” Duquesne said.

“Forgiveness is for God,” Placido Geist said. “The rest of us muddle along the best we can.”

Duquesne smiled. “What’s the story with Emory, the kid who had it in mind to shoot you?”

“His pelt’s worth fifty thousand dollars, you take it in to Austin and deliver the goods to Randolph Benét.”

Duquesne was shocked at the amount.

“I chose not to be the instrument of the colonel’s revenge, but I’ve no objection to your collecting on the debt.”

“Blood money.”

“And paid for in kind,” Placido Geist said. He mounted the claybank mare. “I’m obliged to you for it.”

He rode out.

Duquesne watched him go. Of course the colonel’s money was tainted. The only thing left untainted was self-respect.

There were always fated moments, though, he reflected. Perhaps his had come the first time the bounty hunter rode into town, bringing trouble the way a storm front presages rain. The sheriff didn’t fault Placido Geist.

It’s said that character is destiny. And how not? Duquesne asked himself. A man’s character was all he had to show. You played the cards you were dealt. Some men lived up to their own expectations and some didn’t. Some men lived lives without expectation and had no credit to redeem when they were called to the final account. What did it matter? You tried to become the man you imagined yourself to be, knowing that every man dies disappointed in himself.

But the dead have no memory. Only the living remember. At the end of the day, they alone survive to bear witness.

“So, a happy outcome,” the judge said.

“I’m not convinced there are happy outcomes,” Placido Geist said.

“Didn’t we have this conversation once before?” Lamar asked him. “The perfect proving to be the enemy of the good?”

“Not precisely my point,” the bounty hunter said. “I meant the scales aren’t balanced.”

“You don’t have a murder warrant hanging over your head, or a bounty on your remains.”

“I find it less than complete.”

“We’ve had this same conversation too,” Lamar said. “When is a thing finished? It’s done when you decide it’s done.”

“I’d imagine it to be done,” Placido Geist said.

“What’s your argument with it, then?” the judge asked him.

“Lack of absolution.”

“Whose? Kick Emory dead, albeit unfortunately. Thus, the colonel mollified.” Lamar held up his hand. “The reverse of your intention, I understand. Still. This ill-found business with the Hagertys resolved, or at least held in abeyance. Where are you looking for indulgence? I’m not the pope in Rome.”

“I have myself to answer to.”

“Answer to yourself, then,” Lamar said to him, “but do it on your own time.” He lifted the decanter of Tennessee whiskey onto the table and set down two glasses. “I refuse to listen to a man sober, if he’s going to wax lugubrious.”

“Lugubrious?” Placido Geist took umbrage. “I’m asking you to parse a moral issue,” he said.

“Horse snot. You’re turning sentimental.”

The last thing he ever thought he’d be accused of. “You’re turning downright Biblical in your dotage,” he said.

“I sat the bench thirty damn years, and I was Moses.”

“Moses, my teeth.”

They glared at each other, and then the judge suddenly burst out laughing. “Here we are, bickering like an old married couple,” he said. “Is that dignified?”

“No, but comforting,” the bounty hunter said.

Lamar put out the chess pieces. “When is justice honestly served?” he asked, rhetorically. “The younger of Hagerty’s sons died at your hand because you knew he’d escape the noose.”

“That was bad luck all around.”

“It was necessary,” the judge insisted.

“I’m not offering an apology.”

“But you doubt yourself.”

“I doubt the wisdom that’s passed down, like the laws of the Hebrews,” Placido Geist said. “We’re drawn to absolutes and condemned to folly.”

“Each of us makes choices. It’s only given to fools to make the easy ones, because they choose the simpler course.”

“The lesser of two evils.”

“Evil isn’t a matter of degree,” the judge said.

“Derek Hagerty wasn’t evil and neither was Kick Emory,” the bounty hunter answered. “Foolish or willful or just plain damn dumb stupid, but wickedness found them by accident.”

“And so did you,” Lamar said. “Was that accident or their own doom? The turning of the wheel, appointed and implacable.”

“Pour the whiskey,” Placido Geist said. “This conversation is making me dry.”

Lamar tipped the shot glasses full. “No man goes dry in my house,” he said.

Content

Gates David Edgerley Blood Money

David Edgerley Gates Blood money