Chapter Twenty #2
His hand closed on the barrel while he pushed it sideways, away from his chest, fighting Wilkes for the angle.
Wilkes fought back with the wiry strength of a man who'd survived by being harder to kill than the people who wanted him dead.
The barrel swung between them, pointing at the ground, the sky, the crowd, and at Sam.
Sam gripped the cylinder with his other hand and twisted, trying to wrench it free.
The gun went off.
The sound split the fair in half. Every other noise—the screaming, the shouting, and the fiddle music that had somehow still been playing—disappeared into the blast. The muzzle flash burned across Sam's left side—a searing white line from his hip to his lowest rib, and the force of it spun him sideways while his grip on the gun broke loose.
He lost his grip on Wilkes and lost his balance, his feet tangling over each other as the pain arrived. Not gradual, not building. Just there. Suddenly and totally: a fire burning along his left side.
The crowd erupted. People ran in every direction. Women screamed while men shouted and children wailed. The orderly rows of the fairground dissolved into panic, stalls knocked over, goods trampled.
Wilkes moved through the chaos. Sam tried to track him—tried to keep the dark coat in sight while his knees buckled and his left hand pressed against the wound on his side.
Hot blood seeped between his fingers. The coat moved through the scattering crowd, weaving between running people heading for the north exit.
They disappeared the way Wilkes always disappeared, into motion and confusion, and the anonymous cover of a crowd too panicked to notice one more man slipping through it.
Sam reached for the Colt on his hip. His right hand found the grip, pulled the revolver free, and he raised it toward the retreating coat.
The crowd surged between them. Families, children, people running blind from the gunshot, filling the space between Sam and Wilkes with bodies he couldn't shoot through.
He lowered the gun. His left knee gave out.
The fairground dirt hit his kneecap hard enough to jar through his entire body.
His left side burned from hip to rib while blood soaked through his shirt into the waistband of his trousers, hot against his skin in the cold air.
He pressed his hand harder against the wound, his fingers finding the channel the bullet had cut, a furrow along the outside of his torso, deep enough to bleed heavily but angled wrong for hitting anything vital.
He'd been grazed. A bad graze, the kind that bled like a stuck pig and hurt enough to make the world swim at the edges, but a graze all the same. He'd live.
Wilkes wouldn't. Not after today. Not after pulling a gun in a crowd full of children. Not after shooting a man in broad daylight at a town fair with a hundred witnesses. The bounty poster said dead or alive, and Sam Cooper had just upgraded his personal preference on the matter.
Someone knelt beside him, a man he didn't recognize, pressing a cloth against the wound on his side. More voices followed, more hands reaching for him while the world tilted sideways and his blood dripped into the Montana dirt.
Foster's voice cut through the noise, shouting orders somewhere to his left. Deputies' boots pounded past. The law had arrived about thirty seconds too late, when Sam Cooper had already done the bleeding.
He stayed on one knee in the dirt with his hand pressed against his side, and the Colt still gripped in his right hand.
He could taste Wilkes's blood on his split knuckles.
The fairgrounds lay in shambles around him with stalls knocked sideways, goods scattered, and people huddled in clusters at the edges of the field.
The fiddle had stopped playing. Even the prize bull had gone quiet.
Somewhere in the crowd, Evelyn stood watching.
Or running toward him. Or being held back by a deputy.
He'd told her to stay close. He'd taken her elbow and steered her toward safety.
Then he'd let go and run straight toward the most dangerous man in the territory, because twenty years of hunting Amos Wilkes had burned a groove in his brain so deep that no promise, no kiss, no woman with a carved horse in her pocket could steer him out of it when the moment came.
Coward, she'd called him. She'd been wrong about that, at least today.
Today he'd been brave enough to run face-first into the thing he'd been chasing his whole life.
The cowardice would come later, when he had to look Evelyn in the eye and explain why he'd chosen the ghost over the woman standing beside him.
His knee ground into the dirt. His side burned. The blood kept coming. Foster's voice kept shouting.
He stayed on his knee, held the Colt, and watched the north exit where Wilkes had gone. The only coherent thought left in his head, the one that survived the pain and the adrenaline and the ringing in his ears, said: I had him. I had him in my hands.
He'd let him go.
Again.