Death and the Dreaming

Sixkiller rides under moonlight up the river road. He’s on the hunt now, deep in the fevered agitation that will drive him until he makes that kill. The Boss will visit the torments of hell on his body till he gets the job done.

Read part one here.

He can hear the noise of Meridian’s nightlife from here. The silver mines are rich and the ranges thick with cattle, and men spend lavish money in the mining towns that dot the riverbanks between here and Mexico.

This night’s prey is one of those highrollers, he guesses. The image in his mind shows him a brown haired man in a good shirt and handsome snakeskin boots. And that silver ring. The ring burns bright in his mind, clear identification of the target. His pay for this one? He lets that hopeful thought linger in case the Boss is listening.

Coming up on the road into Meridian, Sixkiller slows the horse to a walk. Town lights flicker through the branches of cottonwood and palo verde trees above the riverbank. He needs to think a little now, searching ahead for the location of this man. It comes to him after a moment: a whisky-smelling place with lights and music and women. Either the Silver Lady Saloon or Maggie’s House. Sixkiller smiles. He’ll be on his way by dawn.

The horse shies suddenly. Sixkiller reins in, reaching for his revolver. His senses, burning sharp, stretch beyond him. He feels rather than hears the sounds beyond the bend in the road: human footsteps, quick and light, pattering in the hard packed dirt.

Sixkiller waits, gun in hand.

Silhouetted against the lights, a woman quicksteps around the bend in the road. She’s wearing nothing but a dressing gown of Chinese silk and a thin linen shift underneath, and she freezes at the sight of Sixkiller on his tall bay horse.

“Here now,” says Sixkiller. Staring at the gun in his hand, the woman clutches the dressing gown around herself and shrinks back into the bushes.

“I don’t aim to hurt you.” Sixkiller speaks slowly and softly, as if to a panicked pony, and he knees the gelding gently toward her. His mind jumps with the need to kill and get it done. But the look on this woman’s face stops him. She’s dead scared and desperate, going out into the night with no more on than that skimpy robe and a pair of velvet slippers.

“You in trouble?” Sixkiller asks.

The woman meets his gaze. Moonlight shows Sixkiller her bruised red lips and the makeup running down her cheeks. A smear of blood slashes across her chin, like warpaint gone wrong. Her eyes, wide and smudgy dark, size him up too: black, nothing but black, shirt and trousers and boots on a tall man with black wavy hair on his shoulders and a strong dark face with its Apache nose and African lips.

“Can you take me to Tombstone? Or, no, Agua Dulce, across the border?” she blurts, glancing over her shoulder down the empty road into town.

“Sorry. My business is in Meridian,” Sixkiller tells her. The Boss prods, fire in his head and along his nerves. “Tombstone’s the other way. Somebody after you?”

“No. Maybe. Probably soon.” The woman smiles, and Sixkiller knows her profession. “Can’t that business wait, a little? I’ll make it worth your while.”

The fanciest whore in the Territory can’t compete with the Boss, not when there’s a job on the line. But she’s a woman bloodstained and alone on the road, and Sixkiller is a gallant man.

“Sorry,” Sixkiller says. “I got to go. I can take you as far as –“

“Please. I really can pay,” she says. “Look.” She stretches out her hand. Under the moonlight, the ring gleams in her palm: broad silver band meant for a man’s finger, inlaid with big chunks of turquoise.

“It’s yours if you take me across the border.”

A sudden chill shivers in Sixkiller’s mind, draining away that prickly hot feeling that drives him to do the job – a job pinned on the image of a man’s long-fingered hand, decorated with a ring just like that one. Slipping the revolver back into its holster, he swings out of the saddle.

“Where’d you get that ring?”

The woman closes her fingers over the ring and takes a step backward. “I found it. It’s good silver, you can bank on that.”

“You didn’t find it.” His face is a blur in the dark, but the woman hears the edge in his voice, and she takes another step, backing into the bushes.

“Where’d you get it?”

Tonight Argentine has killed. Behind the shock of it burns a fierce satisfaction. She knows she can do it again. Now, if she has to. Pulling the gent’s pistol from her pocket, she stands up straight and meets the eyes of the man in black. “Don’t come any closer.”

Watching the pistol, he steps cautiously, gauging her will and ability to use it. “I don’t mean to harm you,” he says. “But I need to know about that ring. Put the gun down and we’ll talk.”

She levels the pistol at his chest. “Will you take me?”

“Yeah.” Sixkiller closes the distance between them in one long stride and her wrist with one hand and the pistol with the other. She twists, but his fingers tighten. For the second time that night, Argentine gathers her strength and aims for the crotch.

He dodges aside. “God damn!” But his grip slackens briefly. Argentine stumbles free, lurching for the tall bay horse.

She’s halfway into the saddle when he hauls her down and sets her hard upon the ground. The ring, jolted from her grip, flies into the soft sand by the roadside. One iron-fingered hand on Argentine’s arm, the horseman retrieves it, thrusting it in front of her face.

“The man who wore this. Where’d you see him? What happened to him?”

“Let go of me. And I might tell you.” The ring gleams in the moonlight. Argentine reaches for it, but his grip tightens.

“Listen. I don’t give a damn about what you’re up to. But I need to know one thing. Is he dead?” The man in black leans in. Moonlight sheens the dark planes of his face. The fury in his eyes sets Argentine’s heart to hammering.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Are you the law? A bounty man? What’s in it for me if I tell you?”

“I could say, your life, darlin.” The stillness in his voice tells Argentine what she needs to know. This man lives outside the law.

“I killed him.” Argentine hears herself say, just as if she’d said, I borrowed your new stockings.

The man in black stares at her. “God damn,” he says. “Well, Boss, what do you think of that?” He laughs a long time, face raised to the moon and the starry sky.

Shaking his head, he opens his fingers. Freed, Argentine stumbles backward. He scoops up the pistol, tucks the gorgeous silver ring into his shirt pocket and swings into the saddle.

“Wait!” Argentine pulls the dressing gown artfully down over one shoulder. “What about me?”

The man in black smiles, a shark’s grin in his dark face, and reaches down a hand to her.

Argentine smiles too, and scrambles up, swinging a bare leg across the smooth worn leather of a very good saddle. Dizzy with an exhilaration that drives away fear, she wraps her arms around the horseman’s waist, breathing in the smells of tobacco and sweat on his shirt.

Sixkiller turns the horse off the road toward the river, and comes to a stop behind a thick stand of cottonwoods where the water runs like silver, curling and licking at its banks. Cocking his head, he listens. Argentine listens too, hearing nothing but the sounds of the river and the distant clamor of music and laughter from town.

“All right,” says the man in black. “We've got some talkin to do.”

“He got rough.” Sitting crosslegged before a little campfire in the river sand, Argentine tells it all to the gunman called Sixkiller. There’s been no sound of pursuit, no traffic on the road. She wonders if they’ve found the gent’s body yet.

The sky is full of stars and blackness, now the moon has set. Sixkiller offers her jerky and biscuits from his saddlebag. He’s calming now, the frantic hammering of his blood fading as it becomes clear the kill is out of reach. The Boss doesn’t waste his good tools.

Argentine bites vigorously into the jerky. “I was scared. But I don’t feel bad at all. He had it coming. And -- I felt like I was flying.” She glances up at Sixkiller. “I bet you know what that’s like. You’re a hired gun, ain’t you.”

Sixkiller’s lived by his guns since he was sixteen. But it’s only since the Boss took over his dreams that he’s killed so many, for so many unknown reasons. “I do my job, that’s all. Same as you.”

Argentine reaches for a biscuit. “But it’s all so romantic,” she says. “Here’s you, dashing all over the desert, killing people who deserve to die. Just like Robin Hood.”

“Oh, I don’t know if they deserve it or not,” Sixkiller says. “I follow orders, and I get paid. The Boss won’t take no for an answer. If I didn’t do what he tells me – he’d know. And I’d pay for it.”

Downstream, a coyote calls, and another answers with a yipping laugh. Others join in, a chorus of high-pitched howls rejoicing in a kill.

“Sixkiller?” Argentine asks when their laughter dies away. “Who’s your Boss?”

“Ah, now that’s the question.” Sixkiller almost regrets settling down all cozy for a chat. But no one’s ever snatched a job from under him like that before, and he’d had to find out how. Argentine is sharp and tough, and he likes her enough to tell her the truth.

“I don’t know for sure,” he says. “Though I suspect it’s Old Scratch himself. I met him once, in the flesh. Offered him my service. Didn't think of it again till he came to me in a dream one night, telling me a certain man had to die. I figured it was just a nightmare, so I didn’t do it. After, I was like to die, burnin from fever like a heatstroke for days. Now,” Sixkiller tells her, “I don’t go asking stupid questions.”

Argentine watches the play of firelight on the gleaming jet handle of Sixkiller’s revolver.

“I wanted to be a singer,” she says.

Toward dawn, Sixkiller dreams another crimson dream. This dream shows him a fat little merchant man, riding a swaybacked horse along the road into Tombstone. A big gold pocket watch drapes across this man’s broad belly, and the horse carries a brace of fat saddlebags.

Sixkiller’s eyes snap open to a sunrise sky. The wind is cool and sharp, ruffling the tumbled hair of Argentine, who sleeps wrapped in her ridiculous little dressing gown on the other side of the fire.

Why? He asks the burning presence in his mind.

Flaring burst of annoyance. Sixkiller has a brief vision of a vast crimson desert, stretching toward mountains the color of iron. The smell of charred flesh fills his nostrils.

Why? The Boss mocks. Because I only hire the best.

A sniff and a rustling, and Argentine sits up. “Sixkiller?” she says. “I had the strangest dream. All red, like blood, like a desert on fire. And oh, the handsomest gent was in it! Telling me I’m to kill this little fat man down in Tombstone.”

Sixkiller stares at her for a long amazed moment. Then he fishes in his pocket for the silver and turquoise ring, and tosses it to her.

‘“Yours,” he tells her. “You earned it.”

Argentine runs a finger around the thick silver band. “I did, didn’t I.” She remembers how it was to kill that gent. How it was to feel like flying. She slips the ring over her thumb and smiles at the man in black.

Sixkiller reaches for his saddlebags. “Come on. We got us a job to do.”

Behind the Scenes: This story was a little too long for a quick read, and not long enough to be divided into chapters, hence the two-parter.