Simon Hawke - The Six Gun Solution

He wondered what the hell he was getting into. Was he falling in love with a hooker? Jesus, that would be really stupid. Stupid and destructive. And yet, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. What they had shared was real. He had no doubt of that. He did not know how he felt about it. Logically, he told himself, he should forget it. Don’t get involved. He had a job to do and he could not afford distractions. Nor could he afford to fall in love with someone who, when he was born, had already been dead for over eight hundred years.

He could not reconcile the image of the tender and loving young woman he had made love to with the image of a girl who worked in a saloon and hustled drinks and would have sex with any cowboy who could afford the price. A hooker with a heart of gold? Come on, he told himself, get real. Don’t be an asshole. Yet, he kept thinking of her lying on top of him, with her hand gently placed against his cheek, her beautiful blue eyes gazing deeply into his, as if in wonderment

…

Don’t do this, he thought to himself. It was just a brief sexual encounter, nothing more. She had been excited by the prospect of making it with a handsome, dangerous, young gunfighter and there was nothing more to it than that. Hell, it was probably only a come-on. Next time, she’d charge him. If there was a next time. He knew it would be stupid. There would be no next time, he told himself. However, his resolution lacked conviction. He sat down on the bed and touched the pillow where her head had lain Jesus, he thought, she had actually cried.

Why had she cried?

Hop Town was west of the Tombstone business district, just past Third Street, yet it might as well have been on the other side of the world. It was Tombstone’s Chinatown, home to some five hundred Chinese immigrants, “coolies.” as they were often called, who came to work on railroad construction gangs and in mining operations and in laundries and whatever other menial labor they could find. For most of the Chinese residents, it was a temporary situation, a way to find some work and make some money and return to the homeland, so they made little attempt to become acculturated to American society. As a result, Hop Town was like a little slice of China dropped into the frontier. Most of the residents of Tombstone never ventured there, preferring their own saloons to the Chinese opium dens and gambling houses. There was one exception.

Jennifer Reilly entered the opium parlor and held her breath as she walked through the smoke-filled room with its tiers of wooden couches, like cramped little bunk beds, most of them occupied by Chinese men reclining in states of drug-induced stupor. Jennifer had often thought that if there really was a Hell, it must be a lot like this. Heaven, she imagined, with a childlike simplicity, would be like some Elysian field, with waving heather and wildflowers and dreamy little thatch-roofed cottages from which harp music emanated while laughing little children, those innocents who had tragically died young, ran barefoot through the grass with little lambs and goats. It was a wistful vision, made melancholy by her certainty that she would never go there when she died.

She wasn’t sure if she would go to Hell. She was a sinner, of that she had no doubt. She never went to church. Aside from the fact that it would have scandalized the respectable women of Tombstone if she had done so, she knew that she did not belong there. Church, like Heaven and Hell, was a place where people went. Real people. Not creatures like herself.

Often, when she looked in the mirror, she thought to herself that she looked real. She looked pretty-she knew that because so many men had told her so, and she knew they could not tell that she was not what she appeared to be. When she examined her own image in the minor, she thought that she could not tell, either. But she knew. She would often think to herself, longingly, ‘How am I different?” And yet she knew she was. Because she had not been born. She had been made.

The nature of her creation was something that she didn’t really understand. God created Man and Woman. The Master had created her. He was the closest thing to God that she would ever know.

He had made her in his laboratory, where she had been born not of a woman, but of an artificial womb, and he had molded her mind and placed her with others like herself, a man and a woman who had acted as her parents, though they were not her parents and could not be parents, ever, for they were just like her. She could never have a child. She could never be like other people. Real people. Those who had acted as her parents, until she was old enough to be of use to the Master, had taught her all about who and what she really was. She was not a human being, but a creature called a “hominoid, someone who only looked human but was really something less. She owed her existence, and her unquestioning allegiance, to the Master. And she had never questioned it, till now.

That she could even think of questioning the Master’s wishes frightened her. Yet, it seemed impossible for her to think of Scott as being an enemy. The Master said he was. He had told her that he was one of those who came from the future, to seek him out and kill him. She knew that Scott could kill. She found it hard to believe that he could kill the Master, because the Master was so powerful and his enemies had always failed in the past. Yet the Master was concerned about them, concerned that they could interfere with his plans. If he had told her to kill Scott, she would have done it, without question. Only now, after what had occurred between them, she was not so sure.

She had been with many men since she had come to Tombstone. She had been told what to do and she had done it, though prior to coming to Tombstone, she had never been with a man and was not sure what to expect. The Master had told her, in brief, clinical terms, and explained that all she had to do was whatever the men wanted and act as if she enjoyed it immensely. She had not found it enjoyable. The first time, it had been painful and. despite her efforts, the man had not been pleased. She had cried afterward and felt terrible. But, as time went on, she found that it became less unpleasant, though it was never really pleasant. Most of the men were coarse and rough. Some of them had hurt her. A few, like Doc, were not so bad. She did not really mind doing it with Doc, though when he’d been drinking, he could be very rough, and Katie had told her that if she ever found out she was with Doc again, she’d cut her face up. Katie would do it, too. But Scott… with Scott, it had been different.

She’d felt differently about him from the very first. She knew that he was dangerous and that he was the Master’s enemy, but she still found herself drawn to him. He was nicer than the other men. Cleaner. More of a gentleman. And he had been gentle. Tender. It had never been like that with anyone before. The orgasm she had experienced with him had been her first and she did not really understand what it was, but when it had happened, it had overwhelmed her. It had both thrilled and frightened her. So that’s what it’s like, she thought to herself later. That’s what love feels like. Until then, she had not known. She had not thought herself capable of feeling it. Love, after all, was something only humans felt.

She had wept when it had happened, both because of the powerful feelings it had released in her and with joy, because she had discovered that she could feel those feelings, and at the same time, with utter misery, because she had deceived him. She had cheated him. She was not a real person and he believed she was. She had cheated others in that manner before, but it had never really mattered to her because she knew that she had never really mattered to them. Only Scott was different. She was in love with Scott. And she had no right to be in love. Not with any man, and especially not with Scott, who was the Master’s enemy.