My Hero Read Free Page B

you?
    â€˜Thank you,’ said Jane. ‘I’ll let you know.’
    But . . .
    â€˜Goodbye.’ She switched the machine off and pulled out the disk. As she did so, the printer suddenly screamed into life, shuttled the daisywheel a few times and went back to sleep. Jane pulled out the paper.
    I ALSO DO COMEDY , it read. AND BAR MITZ-VAHS .

    Having binned the page, switched on again and deleted yesterday’s effort, Jane sat for a moment, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do now. A long time ago she had decided that writing was like the school holidays: a noisy cluster of whining voices, saying that they’re bored and demanding that she find them something to do.That’s the trouble with characters. No bloody initiative.
    Â 
    Skinner leaned back against the rock, feeling dazed and extremely foolish, as befits a man who’s just shot his own villain.
    â€˜Told you,’ crowed the Scholfield in his hand. ‘Piece of duff, I said. Easy as falling off a—’
    â€˜Oh sure,’ Skinner snapped. ‘Nothing to it really LaForce shoots, nearly takes my head off; I stagger back in terror, accidentally jarring my hand against the rock; you go off; the bullet ricochets off his left stirrup-iron, his belt-buckle, the other guy’s wooden leg and a flat stone, and ends up going straight through the back of his head, thus producing the only known instance of a man being shot from behind by someone standing directly in front of him. I do that sort of thing for a pastime.’
    â€˜Well,’ sniffed the Scholfield, ‘on page 86 of Painted Saddles , you have the hero shoot at the villain’s reflection in a mirror, through two locked doors and a piano.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Skinner shouted, ‘but that’s fiction !’
    â€˜So’s this.’
    Skinner sat down heavily and stared mournfully at the corpses littering the canyon floor. ‘Yes,’ he muttered soberly, ‘I guess it is, at that.’
    A revolver can’t frown, but someone with an excessively vivid imagination might have thought he saw the trigger guard pucker slightly. ‘I don’t know why you’ve suddenly come over all droopy,’ the gun said. ‘Thought
you’d be pleased, your worst enemy dead and all. Should make life a bit easier all round.’
    A bullet sang off the rock, six inches or so above Skinner’s head. He jerked sideways, tripped over his feet and fell behind a small, round boulder.
    â€˜You reckon?’ he said.
    â€˜Who the hell’s that?’
    â€˜This is pure conjecture on my part,’ Skinner replied, ‘but maybe it’s one of the posse members who rode away when you started shooting.’
    â€˜And now you reckon they’ve come back.’
    â€˜Fits all the known facts, don’t you think?’
    â€˜Yippee!’
    An expression of revulsion passed over Skinner’s face, and he glared at the pistol in his hand. ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of fighting?’
    â€˜No. I’m a gun. Think about it.’
    Skinner sighed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m a human, and I do. Any ideas?’
    The gun was silent for a moment.
    â€˜You could try shooting back,’ it said cheerfully.
    â€˜I thought you’d say that.’

CHAPTER TWO

    T he pigeons were restless tonight.
    They shifted uneasily on their perches as blue fangs of lightning gouged the night sky over the huddled suburbs of Dewsbury. Occasional flashes of livid incandescence, bright and sudden as a flashbulb, threw their long shadows against the far wall of Norman Frankenbotham’s pigeon loft, making them look for all the world like roosting pterodactyls.
    In his shed, Frankenbotham gazed up at the fury of the heavens through the thick lenses of his Specsavers reading glasses. He didn’t smile - he was from Yorkshire, after all - but in some inner chamber of his heart he was