(1986) Deadwood Read Online Free PDF Page A

had something to do with the way things connected for him. "You don't wind up in a place like this for no reason," Bill said.

    Boone May was lying in a bed on the second floor of the gem Theater on top of Lurline Monti Verdi. He loved to say her name. He was finished now, but he liked to lie on top of her and watch her face when she panicked. After the passion left her, Lurline's thoughts always went to suffocation.
    Boone May was oversize—he had a head on him a foot across— and he would lie on her until her breathing changed. Then she would push at his chest with those little white hands. "Boone, honey, I can't breathe . . ." And a couple of minutes later she would be pounding his head with her fists, screaming he was killing her. Boone loved the feel of those soft little fists against his head as much as the sound of her name. Nobody ever came to help.
    Screaming didn't mean a thing at the Gem Theater, and even if it did, everybody knew when Boone was upstairs, and he was the last man on God's earth you wanted to walk in on during fornication.
    He waited for her now, patiently. There was a chair beside the bed, where he'd left his clothes. All except his underwear, which he only removed under sheets. His pants were buckskin, and he'd hung them over the back. On top of that was a leather bag, drawn together at the top by a piece of rawhide. Frank Towles's head was inside it. There was a two-hundred-dollar reward for Frank, but the way things had got between Boone and Sheriff Bullock, he'd have to ride back to Cheyenne to collect. That's where Frank was wanted.
    Boone May didn't know where it went wrong between him and Seth Bullock. The way it always worked, when road agents was identified, Bullock always sent him and W. H. Llewellyn out to bring them back. W.H. was Boone's partner. They hired out as messenger guards for payrolls and gold shipments together, and they both took it as a compliment that the sheriff always came to them to bring in the worst agents. The way the business worked, somebody always got shot, them or the agents. Boone May had begun to see that the sheriff didn't care who that was, and did not take that as such a compliment.
    She began to push at him now, and he smiled. He had teeth the size of a dirt farmer's fingernails. Lurline Monti Verdi was a singer and a blackjack dealer, and she fucked more highwaymen than there was bullets to shoot them. She liked that risky feeling. The head would be a surprise.
    "All right, Boone," she said. "Get off now . . ."
    He lifted his legs up off the bed to put more of his weight on her chest. Her mouth was painted into a little heart, and he could see the tip of her tongue in there in the dark. She began to squirm, but each way she rolled he moved against it, not letting her move an inch.
    Her teeth clenched and she bucked, but he stayed on top, watching her mouth. It wasn't the feel of her underneath him now, it was all in her face. And then she begged him. "Please, honey, I can't breathe. Really, this time . . ." And then one of the fists hit his ear.
    "You're killing me." She said that over and over, banging him, turning red and then white, and he watched it until he was sure it was real, until she quit hitting him with her fists, until she couldn't scream. In the end, her eyes came wide open and fixed on him and waited to see if he was going to call it off or kill her.
    Boone stared at her, feeling the warm, sweet places where her fists had hit his head. He put his hands against the mattress on either side of her and pushed up half a foot. She took that much air.
    Boone looked down at her breasts, the scar across her stomach— Doc Howe had made a mess of that, sewed her up with fish line— the little tangle of hair down where her legs come together. Boone had hung a man last year in Hill City who married a whore and then killed her for all the men she'd had. They paid Boone fifteen dollars to do it. He set the killer on his horse under a pine tree and put a