Shotgun Charlie Read Free Page B

you’re a fair piece from standing.”
    His face pulled away from Charlie and he heard him speak again. Charlie worked to pull in a breath. For some reason he was finding it hard as stone to draw a decent breath.
    â€œBoys! Two of you get over here and lend a hand, drag this fella off of them rocks and lay him out over yonder, well away from this rock pile. Dutchy and Simp, you two mush-heads build a fire back a ways from where he had one. Too close to whatever it is he’s got hidden under them rocks.”
    Charlie had trouble following what the old man was saying, but if he heard him right, someone wasn’t walking well and someone else was going to carry whoever it was. . . . He refocused on the old man. It startled him to see the face reappear, closer than before. Again, he was struck by the eyes set in such a craggy face. They seemed kindly. Something about them told Charlie here was a decent sort of fellow. Not at all what he’d looked at first to be.
    â€œBoy, you hear me? Nod or say something if you can.”
    Charlie fought for another breath. Then it occurred to him that the old man might be talking to him. Maybe he should say something, just the same. Just in case. He nodded, then said, “I . . . hear . . . you.”
    The old man nodded again and smiled, his face inches from Charlie’s. “Don’t you worry. Ol’ Pap Morton’ll take care of you, see you right.”
    â€œWhat for?” said a voice close by.
    Without a pause in speaking, the old man narrowed his eyes and in a grim, tighter voice said, “You get that fire blazing yet, Dutchy? Course not, you’re an idiot. Numb as a . . .”
    Charlie’s world pinched out with the sound of an old man’s reedy voice berating someone for something. For what, he didn’t know, didn’t care. All he knew was that he was probably dead or nearly so. Couldn’t even recall how he got to this sorry state . . . about to be robbed or worse by strange, hard, dangerous men bent on doing him harm. Probably leaving him for dead—ha, that’d be a laugh, a joke on them, as he was about there anyway.

Chapter 4
    â€œWhat I’m trying to tell you, if you’d let me get a word in edgewise . . .” Grady Haskell poked the long barrel of his Colt straight into the fleshy tip of the man’s long nose. He pushed it, held it there for a moment, then pulled it away and looked close before smiling, then laughing. The barrel’s snout left a pucker, a dimple at the end of the long nose. But the man didn’t respond, didn’t jerk away because he was dead. His only reaction was a flopped head that revealed a ragged neck gash that welled blood anew. The wound was not an hour old.
    â€œYou, sir, are a plumb lousy conversationalist. Anybody ever tell you that?” Grady leaned in close again, as if waiting for a response. “Hmm?”
    Getting no response, he howled again, upended a hazel-colored bottle, and bubbled back a few swallows. A thin stream of the burning rye whiskey dribbling out the corner of his stubbled mouth. “Time to get me a Chinese girl, a long, hot bath, and a cee-gar. Maybe even a steak and an Irish apple or two.” He belched and looked around him at the strange room. It should be strange to me, he thought. I have never before been here. And once I do what I need to here, I will take my leave and call it a day.
    He fell asleep for a short time, awoke with a start, determined to kill whoever or whatever it was that had interrupted his earned slumber. He saw no one but the dead man, still slumped as he had been in sleep when Grady had come up behind him and sawed deeply into his bulging neck.
    The sight reminded Grady of his long-dead grandpappy back in the Chalahoosee Ridge, back in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, where he was raised and where his kind still dwelled. Old Pappy, he had been a