Jory Sherman: Blood Sky at Morning

Zak rode toward the coach, his hazel eyes narrowed to thin dark slits. They flickered with little flecks of gold and light brown, specks of magenta. The man emerged from between the horse’s legs, and the woman turned and stared straight at him. A hand went up to her mouth and she stiffened on the seat.

“Ho there,” Zak called as he rode down to the springs, wending his way through the ocotillo and prickly pear. There was a legend painted on the side of the coach: FERGUSON’S STAGE AND FREIGHT COMPANY. Underneath, in smaller letters: HAULING, PASSENGER SERVICE. And, in still smaller letters: Hiram Ferguson, Prop. Zak had seen such before. Ferguson operated out of Tucson, ran lines down to Bisbee, over to Vail and up to Safford. He sometimes connected with freight out of Tucson, since he went places nobody much wanted to go in that part of the country.

The man stepped away from the horses. He was wearing a linen duster, pale yellow in color, and his hat brim was folded to a funnel that shielded his eyes.

“Howdy, stranger,” the man said. “See any hostiles?”

Zak looked at the woman, then back at the man. Suspicion crept through his mind like some small night creature, sniffing, probing, twitching its whiskers. Something about the way the man was standing, the way he held his arms out, slightly bowed, away from his sides. And the woman, just in that brief glance, seemed paralyzed with fear. Fear was something Zak could almost smell, as if it gave off a scent, more subtle than sweat but as distinctive as fumes from a burning match.

“Hostiles?” Zak slowed his horse, halted it a few feet from the man, the coach, the cowering woman.

“You know. Apaches. We run into a hell of a patch back there.”

The man inclined his head in the direction that the coach had come from. Zak noticed he didn’t lift a hand to point a finger.

“No,” Zak said. “I saw no Apaches.”

“Well, they’s about.”

Zak reached into his pocket, fingered the bracelet. He pulled it out, dangled it like bait on a hook from his left index finger. He looked straight at the woman.

“You lose this?” he said.

The woman uttered a small breathy “Oh,” and her face drained of color. She glanced quickly at the man on the ground, the man in the duster, standing at the head of the four horses.

“She didn’t lose nothin’,” the man said, and he glanced up at the woman. The look he gave her was so quick it might have escaped notice from the average person. But Zak caught it. He caught the warning, the puzzlement. “Well, now, she might have,” the man said. “Where’d you find it?”

“I asked her ,” Zak said, his voice flat as a leaf spring.

Zak moved the bracelet up and down. Lances of bright light shot from its faceted surface as he twirled it to catch the sun.

“Or maybe you lost this,” Zak said, fishing one of the earrings from the same pocket. “Or this, the other one.” He held up the second earring.

The woman rubbed her wrist. It was paler than the rest of her skin, a place where a bracelet might have been worn. Then she touched her neck.

Zak put the other pieces back in his pocket, pulled out the necklace. He dangled it like some gewgaw he was hawking, his gaze taking in both the man and the woman.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” he said in an exaggerated drawl, as if he were some backwoods drummer bent on a sale.

“None of them’s hers,” the man said, stepping away from the horses, into the open. He kept his feet apart in a belligerent stance.

“Mister, you seem to be doing all the talking. Is the lady deaf and dumb?”

The man brought his hands back, brushing the duster away from his pistol grips. He wore two guns, like some drugstore cowboy. He bent slightly into a menacing crouch.

“You take your jewelry and ride on,” the man said. “The lady ain’t interested.”

“Here, you take it,” Zak said, and tossed the necklace into the air. It made a high arc, and the man reached up to grab it.

Zak climbed down from his saddle just as the man caught the necklace. He stood facing the man.

“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” the man said.

Zak said nothing. He stood straight and level-eyed, staring at the man.

“I think that necklace belongs to the lady,” Zak said.

“I think you’re full of shit, mister.”

The man dropped the necklace onto the ground. His hands hovered like a pair of hunting hawks above his pistols, a pair of converted Navy Colts.

“You’ll want to think about drawing those pistols,” Zak said, making no move toward his own, a Walker Colt converted from percussion to center-fire.

“Why is that?”

“Because,” Zak said, “I’m the quicksand under your feet.”

The man’s eyes widened, then flashed with anger.

His hands dove for his pistols.

Zak’s right hand streaked down toward his own holster.

The man’s hands grasped the butts of his pistols. He started to draw them from their holsters. He seemed fast.

An eternity winked by in a single split second and Zak’s Walker cleared leather. A snick-click as he hammered back, the sound cracking the silence like the first rattle of a diamondback’s tail.

Zak held his breath, squeezed the trigger. The Colt bucked in his hand as it exploded with orange flame, belching out golden fireflies of burnt powder and a .44 caliber lead slug that slammed into the man’s chest just as the muzzles of his pistols slid free of their holsters.

A crimson flower blossomed on the man’s chest. His breastbone made a crunching sound as the ball smashed into it like a thousand-pound pile driver.

He dropped to his knees. His hands went slack and the pistols slid from his grasp and hit the ground. He opened his mouth to speak, and blood enough to fill a goblet gushed from his mouth.

He never took another breath and pitched forward, dead weight succumbing to gravity.

The woman let out a short cry.

A thin tendril of gray smoke spooled from the barrel of Zak’s gun, scrawling in graceful arabesques before the wind shredded it to pieces that vanished like some sleight-of-hand illusion.

Zak reached down and picked up the necklace, held it up so the woman could see it.

“This yours?” he said, his voice as soft as kid leather.

The woman’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and she slumped down on the seat in a sudden swoon.

Chapter 2

Zak holstered his pistol, climbed up onto the seat of the old Concord. The woman lay on her back, her eyes closed, her face drained of color, a grayish tint around her lips. She was a beautiful young woman, with coal black hair, a patrician nose, fine structure to her cheekbones and jaw. Her lips were full and lightly rouged, and her cheeks bore a faint tint of vermillion, just enough to enhance her smooth, unblemished skin.

Zak straddled her, took her chin in one hand. He leaned down and blew gently on her face, then placed his hands on her shoulders and shook her.

“Ma’am, ma’am,” he said, his voice low, slightly husky.

Her eyelids fluttered, then opened, closed quickly again.

The sun splashed on her pale face. She wore no bonnet and a strand of hair drooped over her forehead like a brown tassel. She wasn’t down deep, he decided. Just floating beneath the surface of wakefulness. Maybe afraid to free herself from the darkness. Afraid of what she might see, of what might happen to her if she opened her eyes and kept them open.

“Miss,” he said. “You can come to, ma’am. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Her eyelids quivered. It was almost like a little spasm, a trembling manifested only on that part of her anatomy. As if, somewhere down where she was, she wanted to swim up, step from the dark ocean into the blinding sun. He wasn’t touching her, just straddling her, one knee on the floorboard for balance, the other leg pressing against the seat. He touched her face, smoothed his fingers down one cheek as if stroking her back to life in the gentlest way.