Gunlaw

Gunlaw 26

Chapter 15 - Fifty Years Ago

"Sally?" George Ay glanced back at his brother Billy. "You dress like a whore, Sally. You a whore?"

Sally's claws pricked at her fingertips, wanting out. Beside her the boy, Remos, bristled, ready to say something dangerous. "I work at the saloon," she said.

Billy came up alongside his brother. The resemblance was in their faces even with the skin of a dozen different men stitched over their bones. Both dark eyed, slim featured, a cleverness to them, a hint of cruelty maybe. George's hair hung long and black around his shoulders. Billy doffed his hat, fair where his brother was dark, close-cropped where George ran wild. "Ain't got nothing against whores, ma'am." He kicked a piece of flicker toward the tracks. "Worthy profession."

"Sally . . . Hunska?" George frowned. "That ain't your face now is it?"

"Look whose talkin'." Billy sniggered, watching the streets all the while. Half of Sweet Water stared at them now, nobody ready to come forward yet. The ruin of Jed Wilks lay where the flickers left him, oozing into the dust.

"You folks best see ta the dead," George hollered out. "They're all gonna be giving birth soon enough, lesting you cook 'em up good." Nobody made a move, as if hypnotised by the train, still gasping steam behind him. "You want a whole bunch more sect crawling outta their cold guts?" He pulled a pistol from his hip and shot the sky. That set the townsfolk going. "Don't spare the wood now. Anything that's left raw – I'm taking for me!" He returned his gaze to Sally, a comfortable grin on dead lips. "Open for business, are you?"

"You leave her alone." Remos Jax, pale but untrembling, shirt torn and soaked with blood from the scourging where the flicker caught him. He'd recovered his knife and lifted it before him.

"Ah, don't mind me, son." Another kind of smile now, eyes dangerous, clever, looking past Remos to the alley between Wilk's store and the Tully Warehouse.

"That's good advice." Billy sunk to one knee to be eyelevel with the boy, loading his revolvers the while. "Don't mind my brother and you might grow up to be something, Remos. Something worthwhile."

"How the hell you know my name?" Remos didn't lower his thin blade.

Billy shrugged, shedding dust from his shoulders. "Came to me."

Sally followed George's gaze. Three figures strode from the alley, the pup Purbright, limping, a crimson stain above his right knee, Eldreth Larrs, plainscoat swirling about him, Henry Walker bowler hatted, rubbing his palms together.

"Murderers." Sally hadn't meant to speak but found the word past her lips before she could swallow it back.

"My kind of people." George set his lips and drew the brim of his hat down. "C'mon, Billy." He holstered his pistol and set off toward the newcomers, shotgun pointing at the ground. Billy tipped his hat to Sally, flashed a grin at Remos, pointed pistol-fingered at Daveos atop Station Rock, and followed his brother. And, as always happens at such times, people trailed after. Sally discovered herself following too, Remos at her side, both of them moved by that inexorable tide that demands such meetings as that between George Ay and Henry Walker be witnessed.

"No need to ask how you boys came to town." Henry Walker took the shabby bowler from his head, rubbed it with his sleeve, moving the dust around.

"Hoo-wee . . ." Purbright put no emotion into the exclamation.

"Helluva mess." Eldreth Larrs smiled a wicked smile that turned his scar into a silver slash from eye to lip.

"Not that we got a problem with mess." Walker stood front and centre, flanked by the others. He held his hat at waist height, between his palms, examining the interior. Sally noticed how close those hands lay to his guns. "We ain't local, boys. Just passin' through. You just passin' through too?"