The Green Ladies: Part 1-Blood Mixed with Whiskey

Hello everyone! I'm new here and I wanted to share a bit of a projcet I've been working on. Hope you all enjoy!

Blood mixed with the whiskey well. The floor of the Golden Times Saloon was covered with them both. The killing had been easy; nothing but a bunch of joy juice-hooked yacks who didn’t know their guns from their cocks. But catching the damn idiots had been a challenge; they’d gone far and fast, the Gordy Thomas Gang. But here they all lay; bodies chock-full of holes with red leaking out of them like they were beer-barrels. They’d been dead not but a few minutes. Enough time for their killer to light his cigarette, wipe their blood from his face with an already dirty rag, and take a seat across from the reason the men had to die in the first place.

“Jack Dance,” said the killer, “been looking a while for you.”

Dance smiled, his curling mustache rising with his mouth. In many ways, he was just like all the papers and wanted signs printed him; handsome, roguish, sly, debonair, with that oily smooth and dark-tanned skin, shadow-black hair that, even after all the gory mess was done, stubbornly remained perfect. The creamy brown eyes, known for charming young maids into giving up their baubles, smiled back at the killer with unabashed defiance; he didn’t seem consider much that his life was in the balance. The killer saw there a pride: the pride of man who’d set himself on a hilltop of moral superiority. He could see now why the common-folk had crowned him as a hero with such a hard-to-hate face and propensity to rob the rich. As the saying went, one man’s outlaw was another man’s hero. But all outlaws were the same to the killer, no matter what mask they wore or game they played to get their reputation. The only thing that mattered to the killer when it came to outlaws was the haul they were worth; which was why he’d gone after the Gordy Thomas Gang in the first place; they had Dance.

Dance chuckled. “Well, I wasn’t exactly running with the intention of being caught.”

The killer put the cigarette in his mouth and let out a few puffs. He said nothing. He just let the flame from the little cigarette light up his shadowed face under his black hat, the embers making the stark white hairs of his beard glow like hot snow. The necklace of sharp, ivory teeth around his neck twinkled, along with the long fang hanging from his ear. The ruby eyes of the black snake heads tattooed on the back of his hands, just barely visible under the edge of his black, rolled-up shirtsleeves, glittered. And the killer’s own eyes glared. One green, and the other red.

Dance indicated the carnage. “I suppose this is the part where you clamp my hands and feet and take me to Harristown to collect?”

The killer took the cigarette from his mouth.  “Nope.”

“Ah. Then Clantonburg?”

“You’re getting colder, highwayman,” the killer said.

Dance’s look of amusement faded away. “Then where?”

The killer said nothing for few moments. Dance boiled. “Where, damn you!?”

The killer made a little chuckle. He leaned closer. “Redemption.”

The look on Dance’s face told the killer that the thief didn’t understand. “Why Redemption?”

“You know why, Dance. You took something that didn’t belong to you but did belong to the city of Redemption. And in the ruckus and smoke, you killed six men. You’ve done a lot of stuff, Dance, thieving and raiding wise. Harassing the Gravesend Trail, robbing the First Chisolm Bank in Capernaum. But now you’ve

gone and took the cake this time. The good folk of Redemption put a price bigger than Golgotha on your head. That’s what I plan on collecting.”

The killer threw the cigarette to the saloon’s floor and stamped it out in a pool of gore.

Dance blinked. “Big as Golgotha, you say? How big is that, exactly?”

“Fifty thousand,” the killer said.

“Fifty…” The thief’s eyes went wider than the sky. “That much…for what I took? It can’t be.”

“It is,” the killer said.

“But—that means that half the Wilds will be looking for me…” Dance said, suddenly devoid of gusto. His eyes started moving from side to side rapidly. The killer could practically see the synapses lighting up a firework show as Dance tried to figure his way out of this. It made him smile.

“You got it right there, outlaw. Which means that Gordy Thomas over yonder.” The killer pointed to a dead man lying on the bar’s top with a pair of glass shards sticking from his throat. “Won’t be the only yahoo looking to scalp you and take that prize. You are wanted dead or alive, you know.”

Dance laughed bitterly. “Let me guess. The reward’s bigger if I’m taken alive, is that it?”

The killer lit another cigarette. “Exactly. And you’d better be glad I took the precious time to notice that minute detail.”

The killer got up from the table and hauled Dance to his feet. They walked out the door into the sun and dusty street. A crowd had gathered in front of the saloon: men, women and children. Even the town marshal, whose mouth was gaping

like everyone else’s.

“Thomas and his gang are dead, Marshal,” the killer said.

The marshal, a man whose skin had barely a scar worn into it from the sun, stuttered as he spoke, “M—Mister Hawthorn—“

“No need to thank me. It was a pleasure doing your job for you.”

The killer pushed Dance onto a horse, then mounted his own black steed.

And they rode off.