The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [75]
“Jesus, that looks like Burgade!”
And there was a quick succession of reports, crisp in the thin air. Burgade was already moving. He heard Hal’s rifle open up from down below. Bullets cranged and whined off the rocks. He climbed as fast as his halting legs would move him, scrambling through the boulders—up through a notch, onto the redrock rim—and he saw Susan immediately, with Shelby right beside her, shooting downhill at Hal’s rifle smoke.
The hard snout of a gunbarrel rammed into Burgade’s back.
He froze.
Provo’s voice, breathing down his neck, said with savage satisfaction. “You’re holding a bust hand, Sam. You’re all through now. Drop the iron.”
Fighting reflexes were not instincts. They were the product of training.
Instinct—self-preservation—dictated obeisance. Provo had a gun in his back. Provo didn’t intend killing him on the spot; if he’d meant to do that he’d have fired already, without giving warning. No. Provo wanted him to suffer. To die slowly and know what was happening to him.
Shelby had turned his gun toward Susan, not to kill her but to add weight to Provo’s threat.
Burgade’s gun was already aimed at Shelby. In the split instant of time when Provo quit talking—when Provo was convinced he had his man cold—Burgade fired.
It cost no time to shoot the man he was already aiming at. His bullet hit Shelby dead-center.
But Burgade wasn’t watching. In the instant of pulling trigger he rammed back, twisting, elbowing Provo’s gun aside.
He was old. Too slow to get away clear with a trick that would have worked perfectly thirty years ago. Provo’s bullet exploded into his body. It propelled him bodily forward with its tremendous muzzle energy.
He hit the ground rolling. Flame streaked out of Provo’s gunbarrel. It caught Burgade in mid-turn, smashed his left arm useless, but Burgade had only one purpose in the world and Provo had made the mistake of shooting to cripple, not to kill, and now Burgade completed his falling roll and fired up from the ground, one shot with fifty years of gun training behind it, and it hit Zach Provo in the right eye. It drilled the eye socket empty, sprayed splintered bone fragments from his face. The hole filled with a bursting yellow and crimson pulp and Provo pitched backward over the rim.
Silence fell. Burgade rolled over. Susan was sitting there beside Shelby’s corpse. She didn’t move. She didn’t seem to recognize him, but she was staring at him. He moved again, felt and heard the broken ends of his bones grate together. Blood pulsed below his rib and a bone showed white. He dragged himself toward Susan. Made it to her and lay there, weak and bleeding. He reached up for her hand and clasped it, and the world went black.
A voice nearby, talking, not making sense. He listened to it but it faded in and out of his hearing. He tried to keep it, but it drifted away and he lost it, and fell away from reality again.
He had a feeling time was passing, a lot of time. A faint sense that someone was touching him, doing something to him. Water in his mouth—someone trying to make him drink. He felt a distant irritation: he wanted to be left alone. Sleep.
His eyes opened. The sky was plum-colored. Dusk. Or predawn. He was on his back, a cool wind rushed over him, whipping his white hair across his eyes. He seemed to be wrapped in tight bandaging and blankets and clothing, like a sarcophagus. He began to sort out pain, to locate the sources of agony: his arm, his left side. He couldn’t feel the fingers of his left hand at all.
He turned his head. The voice was talking again, the same soothing quiet run of talk, just one voice, a man’s, very steady and low, talking the sort of comforting nonsense you would talk to a skittish horse. There, there, now, darling, it’s ended, it’s over, you’re all right, nothings ever going to hurt you again.…
He couldn’t see the speaker. He tried to lift his head to look. He got his head an inch off the ground and dizziness overcame him. His eyelids rolled down and he fell back into darkness.
* * *
Daylight