“Your ploy is weak, sir,” Holliday said carefully, directing the words like gunfire. “If your intention is to get me out on that street to challenge me on some point of honor—well, my honor’s not worth so much. You want to try against me you just need to ask.”
“Doctor,” Ricardo warned, moving close. The young cowboy had a kind of madness that told him that challenging Doc Holliday was a good idea. He wanted to be famous.
There were easier ways. Write a novel. Invade a country.
Holliday stilled his warning with a hand and a smile. He had his own madness—the fearlessness of a man who was already dying. “I want to see what he’s going to do with his fine guns there, and his heap of pride.”
“All right then. I challenge you.” He spoke calmly, but a sheen of sweat glowed on his brow.
While the two men faced each other down, Ricardo glanced at the crowd. Everyone wanted to watch—this was a story they’d tell their grandchildren, for certain. But most of them didn’t want to get too close. Most held back—except for two other men, nondescript white men wearing respectable coats and laundered shirts with neat ties, boots that had seen miles, and holsters tucked away under coats. When the excitable gentleman challenged Holliday, these two each took half a step forward.
This was a trap, Ricardo was sure of it. The cowboy wouldn’t be so confident if he had come here alone.
Holliday pushed back from the table. “Not even a glove to throw down. These are fallen times, aren’t they?” When he flipped back the edge of his coat, a casual move meant to look like he was only straightening the garment after standing, he flashed a glimpse of his revolver. Everyone murmured. There was going to be a show.
The other two men had already left the room, ducking out by some other door in the commotion.
Holliday and his challenger marched together toward the front door like gladiators entering the arena. Not so far off, really. Ricardo took Holliday’s arm and pulled him aside. “He has two friends waiting outside for you. This won’t be a fair fight.”
He clicked his tongue, as if disappointed but not surprised. “They never are.”
“But you’re still going.”
“I have a reputation to maintain.”
Ricardo blinked at him. “A reputation for what?”
“Surviving.” He tipped his hat and winked at Ricardo, who decided he liked the man immensely.
Time was, a duelist would need a second, and Ricardo almost asked Holliday for that honor. But the lanky man marched to the middle of the street before he had a chance. Life in a young country was not so formal.
Didn’t mean Ricardo couldn’t do his part. He walked a little way down the street, steps crunching on dirt, and studied the surroundings. The tops of buildings, the hidden alleyways. For all his time in the West, in some of the roughest places one could ever tell tales about, Ricardo had never seen an actual gunfight. Not like this, with two faced off, hands at their sides, waiting for the draw. His heart, if he’d had one, would have been racing.
Few souls came out to watch. Most stayed indoors, crowded at windows. No one wanted to get in the way of a stray bullet. Almost no one, anyway.
He used his nose, his eyes, his other senses, listening for every heartbeat, every spot of heat moving through the world around him. And there they were, easy to spot for someone like him: one of the men had climbed to the roof of the saloon and lay flat, invisible in the darkness. He aimed down the barrel of a rifle, right at Holliday.
The other was in an alley across the street, pressed into the shadows like his compatriot. His pistol was still holstered—he was backup, then. Holliday had three men gunning for him, not one, and it stood to reason that the one on the roof wouldn’t wait for a polite count of three to fire.
The gunfighters’ breath fogged in the chill night air. Ricardo’s did not.
He focused everything he could feel, everything he’d learned, all that power he’d struggled to understand and fed with blood. Blood was the price for what he was, and there were rewards he’d resisted in the early days. But he’d learned to use them well.
The man on the roof breathed slow and steady, his muscles tense, and Ricardo could just about feel the tension in his trigger finger, a muscle contracting, pulling on a tendon. The man in the alley was calmer, just there to clean up whatever mess the others made. Ricardo would have to deal with him, but not first thing. With his eyes, he watched the tableau before him, Holliday and the cowboy who hadn’t even had the decency to introduce himself—he likely expected to live, to be able to tell everybody the name of the man who’d shot Doc Holliday. They were a good fifty paces apart, hands at their sides, each waiting for the other to flinch. The young one looked like he stood at the edge of a volcano; Doc Holliday smiled, his skin pale with illness until it almost glowed.
Once this started, it would go quickly, but Ricardo could move faster than any of them, and he wasn’t afraid. Another reward for the price he’d paid.
That trigger finger on the roof squeezed, and Ricardo stepped into the street. To observers he would look like a blur, a shadow that had detached itself from the night and somehow appeared to suddenly stand in front of Holliday. When they thought back on the moment, they would say that he had always been there—he must have come out to the street with Holliday, or maybe he had run to warn him. Something. However it happened, he was there, and the bullet from the rifle struck him.
The shot pounded into his chest and he stumbled. Three more shots fired, cracks of thunder in his ears, pounding waves of force that struck the air and brushed against his skin. Three shots, and he looked to where they came from, where he must stand so that the bullets would strike him instead of Holliday.
But all three shots had come from behind him, from Holliday.
First, the cowboy standing in front of them fell. He’d drawn, he’d gotten that far as soon as the shot rang out, but for all his bluster he was too late.
The man on the roof was next. He’d been aiming down the rifle for a second shot, probably wondering how the first had gone so far awry—obviously it had, since Holliday was still standing. But Holliday was at just the right angle to get him first. He slumped over his weapon and lay splayed on the roof as if he had dropped there from the sky.
Holliday had shot the cowboy, the man on the roof, and the one from the alley had just stepped out and raised his revolver when the last shot fired, and the man fell. He lay groaning for a short time, a strangled attempt to cry for help through blood bubbling up his throat. The sound a dying horse might make. Then he died, and that was that.