Gunman's Rhapsody

Wyatt’s horse, tied to a squat clump of mesquite, nuzzled at the inadequate grass while he waited for Wyatt. The inflexible July heat, six miles from Tombstone, was nearly claustrophobic.

“You come back to settle up?” Ringo said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The men were silent for a minute, feeling the hard press of the heat. Breathing the smell of it. Listening to it as if it were audible.

“You’re drunk, John.”

“My natural state,” Ringo said. “Don’t let it bother you.”

“I don’t mean to shoot you while you’re drunk.”

“I’ve shot a lot of men while I was drunk,” Ringo said. “Hell, Wyatt, you wait until I’m sober, you’ll never shoot me at all.”

“We could let it go, John.”

Ringo shook his head solemnly.

“No, Wyatt, we can’t.”

“Why?”

“We ain’t the kind of men let things go.”

They looked at each other. Ringo’s eyes were soft as if they didn’t focus well. Wyatt could hear the faint jingle of harness and the soft sound of the horse’s mouth as the roan browsed on the meager grass.

Had that horse a long time.

“No, John, we’re not.”

Again they looked at each other in the reeking silence of the desert heat.

“But not today,” Wyatt said. “I can’t shoot a drunk sitting on his ass under a tree.”

“No.”

“Hell, John, I don’t even remember how all this started.”

“Sure you do, you stole Behan’s girl.”

Wyatt turned and started toward his horse.

“There’ll be another time, John.”

“No.”

Wyatt kept walking.

“Don’t make me shoot you in the back,” Ringo said.

In the hammering stillness, Wyatt could hear the hammer being thumbed back on Ringo’s Colt. Wyatt turned to his left side and down, pulling his own Colt as he moved. Ringo fired and missed, and Wyatt, from the ground and aiming upward, put a bullet into Ringo’s brain.

The roan looked startled, jerked his head once against the reins that were tied to the mesquite, then went back to eating grass. Wyatt got to his feet and walked over to Ringo.

“So drunk he’s got his gun belt on upside down,” Wyatt said to the empty desert heat. He picked up the whiskey bottle and poured out what was left and hurled the bottle as far as he could into the scrub growth that littered the canyon floor. He heard the bottle shatter when it hit. He stood for another moment looking down at Ringo, who was still sitting against the tree. There was nothing in Ringo’s face. Not death, not peace, not pain. Nothing. Wyatt nodded his head gently as he looked down at Ringo. Then he turned and untied his horse and mounted and rode away.

And I’d steal her again.

Epilogue

Wyatt was with Josie until he died, age eighty, in Los Angeles, on January 13, 1929… Josie died in 1944… They are buried beside each other in the Hills of Eternity Cemetery in Colma, California… Doc died of tuberculosis in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on November 8, 1887. He was thirty-five… Johnny Behan died in Tucson, Arizona, on June 7, 1912… Virgil died in October 1905, in Nevada, where he was serving as deputy sheriff of Esmeralda County. He was sixty-two… Warren Earp was shot to death by Johnny Boyett at age forty-five, in Wilcox, Arizona, in July 1900… James Earp died at eighty-four in Los Angeles, on January 25, 1926… Celia Ann Blaylock (Mattie Earp) died July 4, 1888, from an overdose of laudanum, in Pinal, Arizona… Ike Clanton was shot to death by a private detective named J. V. Brighton at Eagle Creek, Arizona, in 1887… Bat Masterson died at his desk in the sports department of the New York Morning Telegraph, October 25, 1921… Alvira Sullivan (Allie Earp) died on November 17, 1947, just short of her 100th birthday… Tombstone remains, shadowed by the Dragoon Mountains, twenty miles east of the San Pedro River… The mines are closed now… The primary business is tourism.

Robert B Parker

Robert B Parker first introduced his most famous character, Spenser, ('that's Spenser with an 's' like the poet') in 1973 with The Godwulf Manuscript. Since then the literate (or literary), wisecracking, hardboiled detective has appeared in over 30 (34 and counting) novels.

Spenser has been acclaimed as one of the great detective characters on a par with Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer and Parker is happy to acknowledge the debt he owes to the great hardboiled writers of the 20th century.

Over the past decade Parker has developed two other detectives over a series of novels, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, (the latter apparently inspired by the desire to write a book featuring Helen Hunt in the lead role, a desire that resulted in 'Family Honor'. And of course Parker has produced a massive volume of work away from his key detectives, including the authorised completion of 'Poodle Springs', Chandler's unfinished novel, followed by a sequel in 1991, 'Perchance to Dream'.