Gunlaw

Gunlaw 13

Chapter 4 – Present Day

Mikeos sat in the shade of the Ansos pillar. Not up close – Jenna had been right about that. Getting up real close to the pillar was hard. He'd settled for a seat on the tomb of some or other former mayor, a hundred yards back. Twice he'd had to move as the sun swung along its path and the pillar's shadow counted out the hours, leaving him behind.

He should have brought his guitar up from the Triple Bar, played out a tune or two for the dead. At least they wouldn't complain about broken notes, missed beats. His fingers moved, remembering chord sequences along his thigh. It had irked him when he picked up his first guitar that hands so sure and swift in the business of killing men became so clumsy in the matter of picking a ditty to make them smile. It still irked him. He grinned to himself, shrugged. At least he enjoyed his playing even if few others did.

Mikeos set his head against a pillowed scroll of stone and stretched out atop the latest in his series of tombs. He'd always thought a tomb would be a permanent resting place before today, but like a corpser he just couldn't stay put. Habit set his hat over his face, despite the shade. It would keep the flies from his mouth in any case. Watching for Jenna had grown dull. She would spot him as she left – her sort never missed much.

"That little witch don't care who wins," Sykes had said. He'd dangled the amulet from dead fingers.

"Guess not." And Mikeos had pulled out the amulet Jenna gave him, a twin to the corpser's. Both made slow revolutions on their hide strips, rotating in synchrony, each a work of wrought silver, a pointed star somehow reminiscent of the gunslinger's badge.

Sweat pooled and ran under Mikeos' hat. He lifted it and wafted a breeze. There was no place south of Ansos and no place hotter. Perhaps not even hell.

"People are a puzzle," Sykes had said.

"Aren't they just?" Mikeos had studied the patchwork puzzle of stolen skin across Sykes Bannon's old bones and wondered.

"The Walker mentioned your name to me, boy." Skyes nodded and his neck bones creaked. "Walker ain't shit to me. He can do his own killin' – only reason I'm gonna shoot you is you're in my way. I don't think you've got what it takes to stand against me, or the sect. But if you find yourself still on two feet after this, have a care. The Walker's fresh meat but he's got backing."

Mikeos had heard stories about the Walker. The kind of tales people tell to make the night seem darker and the walls close in. At the end of it all though the Walker was just another corpser, another waste of skin that couldn't even manage dying. "Backing? Got himself in with a holder?" A holder's money could put a lot of guns at man's disposal. A corpser with a posse might give a man pause for thought.

"Holder?" Skyes laughed. An awful sound, and for the first time in very many years Mikeos actually knew a moment's fear. "One of the Three stands behind that one. The One that hates."

Even now, in the heat of the day, Mikeos shivered. Even with Sykes heart-shot and carted away – the One that hates. Mikeos saw Sykes now, in the green and red behind his eyelids, the corpser falling, heart-shot. People are a puzzle.

The smell of gun smoke still haunted his nostrils. The first man Mikeos shot fell the same way, arms limp, crashing to his knees, pitching forward. The same fall, the same stink of chemicals and burning, the same brief and trembling high, and the long hollow hours after. Ten years, thirty-two men buried in the dust, holed by his bullets, and what had changed?

"I've learned nothing." He spoke the words to hear the truth in them.

"That sounds like at least one thing to me." Jenna's voice, quiet, close.