Fast Guns Out of Texas by Ralph Cotton

Author:Ralph Cotton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 14

Clarity Jones had slid and rolled and come out of her wool coat. The front of her dress had been shredded and torn away. The razor had flown from her grip when her hands scratched and dug at loose rock and dirt before she felt her body slipping over the edge of a narrow rock shelf and into an airy world of nothingness. But before her scraped and battered forearms left that last few inches of ground, her fingers hooked like steel claws into a tangle of tough twisted tree roots that hung out of the earth’s belly. For a moment she had only swung there in a cool breeze, seeing her coat billow out as it plunged downward. She had screamed, but only once, not being a screamer like some of the whores she had come to know during her brief tenure in the life.

Now, sitting on the upper edge of the cliff, smoking a short, slim cigar stub, she looked down at her coat lying below and told herself screaming would not have helped. But now, what to do about keeping herself alive? she wondered.

When she’d finished her smoke, she crushed the cigar stub on a flat rock, stood up, and cupped her tattered dress to her scraped and bruised bosom. She did this not out of modesty, but rather to protect herself from the chilling afternoon air. Looking all around, she saw the flattened stems of wild grass where Willie had dragged Violet’s body off into the thicker pine woodlands.

She wasn’t sure where she should go from here, but she knew that upon seeing the cutting job she’d given Willie and Sly Palmer, Giddis Black would be sending someone out to make certain she was dead. She sighed and tracked along the bent grass, limping a bit, having lost a shoe in her near calamity. Well, send them on, then, Giddis . . . she said to herself as if speaking to Black. She wouldn’t be here, not if she could help it.

Ten minutes passed before she reached the edge of a five-foot-high cut bank and looked down at Violet’s pale naked corpse lying spread-eagle beside a thin stream of water. She wore nothing but her shoes, her dead eyes staring up at Clarity in horror. Her clothes lay in a discarded pile a few feet away. “Oh no, Willie, you wretched swive! You did her! You rotten, mad, sick, bastard!” she cried aloud, scurrying down the cut bank to Violet’s side as if arriving there any quicker would make some sort of difference.

But kneeling at Violet’s side, seeing the blackened bulge where her neck had been snapped by Willie’s powerful hands, Clarity let the reality of death sink in. “I’m sorry, pet, there’s nothing I can do for you.” She sniffled, brushed aside a strand of hair from Violet’s cold forehead, and closed her eyes. As she crossed Violet’s arms on her abdomen and closed her spread legs together, she couldn’t help but see there

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