Gold Glamour's Ghost (Carter Quinn's Quirks and Curios Book 1), page 1
Neil Adam Ray
Gold Glamour’s Ghost
Copyright © 2021 by Neil Adam Ray
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
Illustration ©Isabeau Backhaus, www.isabeaubackhausillustration.de
First edition
Editing by Tim Marquitz
Cover art by Isabeau Backhaus
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
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Contents
I. THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
II. THE DESTRUCTION THAT WASTETH AT NOONDAY
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
III. THE REWARD OF THE WICKED
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Author’s Note
Storm of Shattered Silver - Chapter One
Storm of Shattered Silver - Chapter Two
Storm of Shattered Silver - Chapter Three
I
The Snare of the Fowler
Chapter One
The booing and hissing coming at Ben from the porches simmered down as the ruckus inside the saloon swelled. The doors clattered open, and the good people of Denver watched the building vomit out their hero, Lucas Linden. He slipped across the boards and down the stairs, borne on a turgid sludge of plunked notes from the saloon’s out-of-tune piano and the clamor of drunken voices.
A rectangular locket, made of gold and fronted with polished jade, flipped out of his shirt and dangled in front of him, pulling him down the steps like a horse dragged by its halter. It was meant to remind Lucas of Betty, but like so many other charms and trinkets it hadn’t worked. For Lucas, it was nothing more than a prop to pull out around a campfire when he wanted to moisten eyes and tug on heartstrings.
Lucas landed in a jelly-legged stumble on the street, puffing up dust. He spun to face the saloon doors as they burst open again, this time ejecting his hat and jacket. The hat caught in the wind and tumbled lightly, but Lucas’s tawny duster fell like a wet blanket and landed a hand’s breadth from a steaming splatter of horse shit.
Lucas tottered to the jacket, hooked his finger under the collar, then twirled it over his shoulder and stomped three paces the other direction to where the gust had carried his hat. He cursed and beat the hat against his leg to scare off what dust had had a chance to jump on it.
Ben watched with mingled pity and hatred. He had spent the better part of the last year tracking Lucas, but it still wasn’t too late to back down. He had been close a half-dozen times before but had always been knocked off course at the last minute by one of the rumors or tall tales that were Lucas Linden’s stock in trade.
As drunk as he was, the legendary gunslinger could barely hold himself up, and any shootout he took part in was doomed to end in a pathetic anticlimax. Ben would have preferred to face him on an even field, but seeing the guns tucked in his holsters shook Ben free of such quixotic ideals as fair fights.
Ben’s eyes weren’t the only ones on those bright white grips sticking out of Lucas’s gun belt. The silence of bated breath that filled the usually hectic street was so loud that Lucas, swaying with drink, picked up on it eventually.
When he realized he was on stage, he stiffened, righting himself slowly and tugging his hat onto his head. He looked straight through the crowd nearest him, then honed in on where their eyes darted and whipped around to face Ben.
The air crackled with a score of gasps as people bore witness to a scene straight out of legend: Lucas Linden facing off against Black Heart. A lightning spark of white teeth split the two days of stubble that grew on Lucas’s square jaw.
The wide-eyed watchers whispered, each prematurely constructing the narrative they would spread in barrooms across the West for decades to come. They expected a cataclysmic showdown—perhaps to see the vile Black Heart Ben vanquished for good—but the keener audience members noticed something was off.
Ben wore the all-black costume he was known for but gone were his villainous cackles and overwrought soliloquies. He was not a legendary outlaw but a simple man demanding justice.
“Where were you?” he said at last. Porches creaked with men and women leaning in to hear Ben’s subdued voice.
Lucas clicked his tongue. “Sorry I missed you in Kansas City. I was real busy.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Kansas City, you bastard!”
The crowd jumped at the sudden rise in tone, then buzzed with excitement again. Maybe they were going to get a show after all.
“Where were you when she got sick? When she died, Lucas?” Ben stepped forward a pace. “Where were you when we put her in the ground? Where were you for the last goddamn year while the rest of us grieved?”
Lucas’s cruel impassivity cracked for an instant, his cheeks slackening and a glaze passing over his eyes. A few drips of genuine remorse dribbled through, but the glimpse of humanity lasted only a moment before Lucas shattered it with an insouciant shrug.
“Didn’t see that there was anything I could do about it.”
The dismissal knocked Ben back like a slap, and those on the balconies got a view of his face when he pulled back. Disgusted, they hissed at the sight of his wet cheeks. They wanted violence not sniveling.
“Give me the guns,” Ben said. “Locket, too. You don’t love her, and you never did.”
Lucas snarled, and his face hardened along with his shifting posture. He didn’t stand square with his arms out like he was carrying a cask of beer under each arm, as was standard for these high-noon duels, but stood side-on, slouched back like a windblown tree.
Lucas underestimated the depth of Ben’s rancor. He expected things to go down as they had in all their other encounters. In those, Ben would squeeze off a few sloppy shots, then Lucas—often with the help of marshals or sheriffs looking to increase their cachet with the locals—would round him up and have him arrested or run out of town, humiliated, but none the worse for wear.
But Ben wasn’t playing this time. If he got a chance to shoot, he would aim for the withered lump of malignant tissue that filled the space in Lucas’s chest where most men kept their hearts.
Ben’s hand drifted to the butt of the gun that thrummed like a living thing on his right hip. The irons that filled his holsters were custom made, but they were designed to be big, ugly things, instilling fear with their dark finish and the terrible racket they made each time they went off.
As the tension grew, children clutched at their mother’s skirts and people half-crouched behind cover, but Ben’s focus stayed on Lucas’s holsters. He knew those guns as well as his own. He had dreamt about them every night since his grandfather gifted them to Lucas when he married Betty. They were shining beacons, crafted with care and years ahead of anything those ten-thumbed louts at Colt or Remington could drum up.
The double-action revolvers had swing-out cylinders, were bored to fit a cartridge nearly half an inch across, and were machined with a level of precision that made them the envy of every would-be gunslinger in America, but it wasn’t their destructive capability that drew Ben so relentlessly.
Beyond the sentimental reasons, he loved them for their beauty. They were not the crass instruments of death Lucas and his fanatics worshiped them as, but timeless works of art.
Where many such weapons made by lesser gunsmiths were marked with gruesome etchings—like the ever-popular cavalry charge of men with guns manifesting their destinies against a line of the land’s native inhabitants—the drums of the guns Lucas Linden wore were decorated with twining ivy and big blooms of many-pedaled flowers. They were guns of peace and peacekeeping, not of gloried violence.
Lucas rocked like a reed with the tide, and his hand started to move. As it crawled up his calf, those hunkering behind cover rose to their tiptoes, unable to resist the allure of witnessing such a momentous event.
At last, Lucas’s hand jerked toward the ivory grip poking out o
He looked up at Lucas, expecting to see the black eye of a barrel pointing at him, but Lucas hadn’t moved. One of his fingers rested on his gun’s grip, but the rest of his hand was as slack as his body.
Ben tried to draw again, but the entire right half of his body was stone. Pins and needles spread from where his finger pressed into the trigger, then sharpened to shooting pains when Lucas cocked his head.
Lucas straightened his back, squaring up, and all of Ben’s muscles tightened at once. A sudden high wind blew down the chute of Denver’s main street, rocking Ben. People cowered as they saw the fullness of Lucas Linden’s might brought to bear.
When Lucas took a step forward, Ben’s body tried to stagger back, but rigor mortis had pinned his feet to the ground. The blue of Lucas’s irises flared, burning away to reveal infernal embers that held Ben fast.
Lucas’s lips moved in a constant babble, but all Ben heard was the sibilant rush of the wind. He begged for Lucas’s fell speech to stop as the force that gripped him reached his heart and squeezed it tight. He would have gladly chosen a bullet over this pain, but he couldn’t control his fate any more than he could release the gun in his hand.
The wind picked up yet again as Lucas trod forward. Men clutched their hats, women yelped, and doors and shutters all down the street slipped their latches and set to clattering. Ben’s body crunched in on itself, and a hot gush of wetness spread down his leg.
He hadn’t seen Lucas’s hand move, nor had he heard a shot, and when he wrested enough control of his body to creak his head down and assess the damage, he found no more holes than God had seen fit to give him when he was born. He was pissing, not bleeding.
His bladder emptied, and the stream stayed strong by pulling fluid from the rest of his body. First, it drained his humors then, when that store proved insufficient to sate the dry dirt beneath his feet, it wrung the water stored in his muscles. He deflated, sinking to his knees in the fetid mud he had made.
He forced his head up again, ready for Lucas to end his torment, but all he saw of the gunslinger was the tan duster hung over his shoulder as he sauntered away.
They say two men died that day: Black Heart Ben and Lucas Linden. The physical being of Ben Driscoll lived on as a disgraced, broken man, but the only thing Lucas left was a hole. People had looked, some to thank him—some to beg his help—and others to challenge him. But after months of search parties, a concerted effort from the marshals, and a handful of hired Indian trackers turned up no more than ghost stories, they had to let it go. Eventually, people had to admit he was gone.
Chapter Two
The air of the Hard Hope Saloon was full of billowy smoke from a score of smoldering cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and—thanks to a man passed out at the bar with his arm draped too close to one of the kerosene lamps—burning hair. The cloud was so thick you could chew it, but most patrons were preoccupied with choking down Emory’s beer.
Isaac Castle was posted up in the corner, pounding away at the keys of an old upright piano badly in need of a tune-up, or better yet, a more skilled pianist. Castle loved the work despite his persistent bitching about how undignified it was for a doctor to have to take on a second job in a town where ninety percent of the population was sick with some sort of black lung or crotch rot.
When he wore his black frock coat and flat-crowned hat, he was all business, but he was an entirely different person whenever he was stripped down to his shirtsleeves and wailing on the poor piano. There was no tuberculous in the yellowed keys or syphilis to stamp out among the pedals. It was just him and the noise, which some might charitably describe as music.
When he closed his eyes and lost himself in the ecstasy of sound, he looked like a friar—not the kind that spent all day locked up in a cloister, reading about Job and Noah and that fellow Ishmael with the big whale, but the kind who putters around enjoying the glory of God and the taste of beer in equal measure. He was on the podgy side with intelligent eyes, but what really sold the illusion was the fringe of white hair spraying out from the hereditary tonsure at the top of his head.
He had been caught up in the frantic rapture of his playing when the stranger walked in, or else what music was able to force its way through the clangor of misplaced notes might have suffered. Nobody could keep their eyes off the man now seated at the end of the bar, sipping on the whiskey Emory had wordlessly poured for him.
“It ain’t him,” Quinn said without looking up from his study of the cards splayed out in front of him.
Everyone had stolen glances when they could, but Ron gawked. As was the case with most things he did, Ron was not subtle, but then neither was the man at the bar.
Quinn admitted the man looked something like Lucas Linden—the hat, the duster, the shorn fuzz of beard to illustrate his overwhelming masculinity in a way that would not have been outmatched by a giant phallus strapped to his forehead—but it couldn’t be him.
The man’s mug looked like the drawings Quinn had seen pasted on products and pamphlets to sell everything from guns and ammo to dubious tablets meant to increase a man’s virility. That passing resemblance was probably what had given him the idea to impersonate the mythical man in the first place, but if he was smart, he would have gone through the effort of dying his hair or painting on some wrinkles to make it believable.
Ron turned in his seat to look again, and Quinn cleared his throat.
“But did you see the guns on his belt when he walked in?” Ron asked in his best attempt at a conspiratorial whisper. The sheer size of his chest made it hard for him to make any sound quieter than a dull roar. “They looked just like the ones in the stories.”
“You don’t know the first damn thing about guns, Ron,” Quinn said as he stole another look at the man for himself.
His back was straight, arm bent like an L to hold his glass on the counter. The dazzling white smile plastered on his face when he walked in was still there, but his eyes were mirthless. They stayed fixed on the bottles behind the bar as he worked through his first drink with metered sips.
That restraint, at least, was typical. As the regulars were well aware, it saved money, but more importantly, it decreased the amount of swill one’s body had to process. Emory did his best with what he had, but all the good cereal that passed through town went off to the bakers and to feed the horses, leaving him with nothing but chaff with which to brew and distill his drinks.
Emory found himself in the inestimable position of working the bar at the establishment he owned, but he didn’t let the indignity get to him. He remained one of the best dressed in the whole town and had Jorge, his part-time help and full-time companion, launder his clothes damn near once a month.
His outfit—a sharp purple waistcoat over a shirt with white ruffled sleeves—would have looked pristine in the sartorial vacuum that was the barroom on any other night, but it seemed shabby next to the newcomer’s outfit as his trek down the bar brought him past the man. He must have ridden in recently, yet his clothes showed no sign of wear.
The man shifted to greet Emory by cocking his glass. When his arm moved, the tail of his jacket rippled, giving everyone a good look at one of the big fuck off revolvers strapped to his hips.
A collective gasp like sand passing through a sieve betrayed just how many of the patrons had been watching. Many of them looked away in embarrassment, and Quinn covered his surprise with a soft cough as he flipped the next cards off the deck.
“Those handles poking out of the holsters might look like bent basilisk fangs, but smart money says they’re made out of soap,” Quinn said. “That man’s getup is a costume if I’ve ever seen one.”
Ron craned his neck, trying to get another look at the ivory grip. “Maybe we—I mean you—should go talk to him.”
Quinn fumbled his cards. “Why in the hell would I want to do that?”
“He’s new in town. Might need some supplies you could help out with. You’re always saying there ain’t nobody walks through Tarnation for the first time that wouldn’t benefit from one of your elixirs or charms.”
