Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

Micah Shughrue. By many accounts, the nastiest goddamn sonofabitch walking this earth. He was the first man she would kill.

The second man was a foreigner. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. An assassin. Remorseless, dead-eyed, black-skinned. Talked with a funny accent. Wore a fancy suit, fancy hat, grew his hair long like a woman. Carried pearl-handled pistols and, it was said, could knock the wings off a bumblebee’s back with either hand. His shadow was the last thing you saw before your brains fanned out the front of your skull.

He was the second man she would kill. Though in truth, the exact order was not so important.

Minerva had no contract for the Englishman. In point of fact, both Minerva and the Englishman had been hired by the same man: Seaborn Appleton. Both for the same task, killing Micah Henry Shughrue.

“The man has gone feral,” was how Appleton phrased it to her. “I knew of Shughrue’s past misdeeds, but he was valuable to me. Yet in time, he was once again given over to wickedness.”

Appleton had repelled Minerva at first glance. A jangly skeleton draped in cheap seersucker with a face like a dime’s worth of dog meat. She boggled at his success in the pharmacology trade; the only thing she’d ever buy from Appleton would be a sack, which she would slip over his head so as to spare herself the sight of his puckered bunghole of a mouth and his snake handler’s eyes. But a job was a job, and Appleton was paying cash on the barrelhead. As well he ought to, considering the man he was asking her to snuff.

“Why the two of us?” she asked.

“Insurance, my dear. If the Englishman fails, you will finish it. Or the other way round, as may happen.”

“I don’t need his damn help.”

“Oh yes, and he doesn’t need yours. But who can say? Mr. Shughrue is a very… ah, he is a man to whom completeness is key.”

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean he is a completist , my dear. He holds the most fastidious sense of it. A thing is only done once Micah Shughrue has rendered it so, and it is he alone who concludes when those ends have been met. He is a finisher, in all. A more scrupulous sense of finality than any man I have ever met.”

The poached eggs of Appleton’s eyes quivered fearfully. Minerva found yet another reason to be revolted by him.

“He’s just a man,” she said. “A bullet will end him, same as anyone else.”

Appleton didn’t seem so sure. What did he think this Shughrue was, some deathless devil?

Appleton said, “How many men have you killed?”

“Enough,” said Minerva.

“Don’t lie to me. How many?”

Minerva cut her gaze at Appleton—her pale eyes were ringed with gold, but were not yet those of a killer. She had hurt men, quite badly in fact, but… it was not that she was chicken-gutted. It was simply that the opportunity had not presented itself. She was a bounty hunter. The men she’d pursued to that point were meek creatures: debt shirkers, those on the scamper from their creditors. One of them had come at Minerva with a knife; she’d busted his knee with a length of stovewood. She’d peppered another one’s buttocks with wolf shot when he tried to flee. And she’d crippled a bookie named Thelonious Skell for nonbusiness reasons.

But kill a man? End his life? No, not yet. But she was good and ready.

“I’ve killed three men,” she lied.

“And did they die quickly?”

“Slower than they would have liked.”

“You’ll want to finish Shughrue fast,” said Appleton. “As quick as you can pull the trigger. ’Cause he won’t stop until he’s killed you. And depending on his mood, which is poor at the best of times, he might move on to your mother, your father, and your children.”

“Do I look like a mother to you?” she said.

After wrapping affairs with Appleton, Minerva retired to her fleabag motel. It was a day’s drive to Mogollon. Appleton intended to delay his arrival there to ensure that Shughrue—whom Appleton could feel breathing down his neck—would show up the day before. Minerva and the Englishman would also come that same day. All things being proper, Micah Shughrue would be dead by the time Appleton’s VW van crossed the town line.

“Maybe you and the Englishman can work together?” Appleton had suggested.

Minerva demurred. More precisely, she’d said: “I’d rather fall off the roof of a whorehouse and catch my eyelid on a nail.”

She had plans for both men.

Micah Shughrue was all business.

The Englishman? That was entirely personal.

MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUEencountered the Englishman in Trotter’s Stables at the end of Mogollon’s ramshackle main street around midmorning.

Mogollon was a scratch-ass town of less than two thousand souls. It was afflicted with the same leprosy as a lot of these decaying New Mexico boomtowns. A century ago, men had descended upon the area to pan for gold and silver. Claptrap camps went up to service the prospectors—saloons with faro tables, brothels, joints where men spent the gold dust sieved out of the rivers. But nobody was really from a place like Mogollon, and when the gold dried up, towns like it mostly emptied out. Now all that remained was a shell, hollowed out, populated by those too stupid or lazy to move someplace better.

Micah had taken a room at the Two Points, the only motel in town. He did not sleep, but even on a normal night, Micah slept only a few hours. He had flicked on the black-and-white Zenith and watched until the Indian’s head came on and the words beneath it read: Your Local News at 7 AM! When dawn broke over the swaybacked roofs of Mogollon, he dressed in fresh clothes and holstered his pistol inconspicuously and made his way to a coffeehouse that was just opening. He drank bad coffee and ate a honey bun that tasted too much like the Camels the man behind the counter smoked, but still, he ate another as he read a big-city newspaper cover to cover. He scanned the street every so often. The town awoke sluggishly; nobody seemed to have much to do or any intensity about them.

He spotted a man walking down the opposite sidewalk in the direction of the horse stables. Micah had heard about a black pistolman with long ladylike hair and English manners. The exact sort of man Appleton might have hired.

Micah ordered another coffee to go and carried his paper cup out onto the street. He tucked his body behind a wooden column propping up the veranda and watched the black man disappear into the stables. He crossed the street and tossed his coffee cup behind a shrub. The street was thinly trafficked, only a mother pushing a stroller down the opposite sidewalk.

Micah unholstered his gun and eased around the open stable door. It was dim; feathery shafts of sunlight slipped through the wooden slats, picking up a patina of dust. The air smelled of hay and of horseflesh. The Englishman was bent at the feet of a horse. He seemed to be examining a malady on its hoof. He made a sweet clicking noise that came from deep in his throat. Micah slipped behind another horse ten feet away from the man.

“Hello,” he said.

At first, the Englishman remained bent at the horse’s feet, its hoof clasped in his hands. Then he shook his head in a slow side-to-side as if chastising himself. When he stood and turned, his own pistol was drawn. He was met by the sight of Micah, the majority of his body—his center of mass, as a rifle instructor would say—shielded by a dappled roan. Micah was aiming his Colt at the man from under the horse’s belly.

“Ahem,” said the man, “you’ve put me in a spot, old bean.”

It was him. The Englishman. The Whispering Death. And he was right: all he had was a tricky shot at Micah’s head or his legs. Micah had the Englishman’s whole body to hit.