Was never a fan of burials; all that moaning and sobbing over a life already passed. They were needlessly dour rituals; perhaps I'd seen too much death to celebrate it, and Lord knew I couldn't comfort a whimpering coyote. If fate had been kind, the next funeral I'd have attended would've been my own, that was until I received a letter in the penmanship of an old friend. A brother in another life, Jackson Leary. He was dead.
During he ride from my current bootkick in Arizona to the sun-licked plains of the southern border, my mind was astir with questions. Who would've known to contact me? Was this a trap? While we had once been brothers, bonded through gun smoke and whiskey, I'd not spoken to the man in the lesser part of 15 years. Though the letter had come all the same, and with it the news that on a dry and windless Sunday, Jackson Leary was gunned down.
'Lawless Leary' had been a good man in his later years, or so I'd gleaned from the sizable funeral procession he'd drawn; a somber parade for the little town of Agua Frida, which was little more than a strip of general stores, homesteads and an exceptionally quiet saloon. Everything about the place stunk of banality; a banality lost to the murder of one of Agua Frida's finest.
I arrived in my blackest best not a half-day before they put him in the earth. Unease settled upon me like a blanket, to be surrounded by the people that had come to know and love a man who had been a ghost to me long before his death. The occasion was made all the more somber when I noticed the second casket, and that Jackson wouldn't be alone as they lowered him into the arid soil; his wife had been gunned down as well. The air turned bitter in my nostrils, spreading to my mouth. I wanted to wretch, as if long buried sentiments had been exhumed and more corpses were given life; my brother and his wife, slain.
As the preacher rallied his flock with the promise of paradise and cosmic retribution, I made my slow retreat; I suppose Jackson had found God as well in our time apart. "Excuse me, you must be Mister."
Tall as my pinky this girl was, tugging at the cuff of my overcoat. She was in the middling years between girlhood and womanhood; a small figure yet refined features that denoted the onset of puberty.
"Name's Violet." She said in a hoarse whisper. "Violet Leary."
Whilst the lines to a second to cross in my mind, little miss Violet had Jackson's eyes, and most certainly her mother's fairer features. Her hair was sable, darker than most people's, and fell down her back in a thick, singular braid. The nature of our meeting was a grim one, still, I couldn't quite hide my smile. "I'm flattered you'd recognize me, Miss...Leary. What happened to your parents is awful. If there is anything-"
"Not flattery," the little girl corrected with a quick coolness that belied her age, "a fact. Agua Frida isn't big, and no one besides the sheriff has a pistol like 'that'." The emphasis was accusatory but factual. The .45 on my thigh was no cattleman's pistol. It was a duelist gun, quick on the draw and coarsely polished by the smooth leather of its holster. Violet's emerald eyes affixed upon the massive piece of iron, almost perplexed as to how such a small tool was capable of so much bloodshed. "My father told me about you...He said that...that if anything were to happen to him that I should contact you. There was a whole list of where he thought you might be, so I had to send letters everywhere. I didn't think anything would come of it."
"What would you need with someone like me? Me an your father go back, true, but I doubt he asked you to dig me up incase things went south so I could bring flowers." I asked incredulously, and in so doing risked incurring her wrath.
It seemed I'd guessed correctly as she loosed a reprimanding sigh, shaking her head as though disappointed in me. Or maybe she was disappointed in herself? That her mission required a proxy pistolero.
"The man that gunned down my daddy used to run with him, and you, in an outfit."
That gave me some pause. A knot in the gut, the bitter sting of confounding betrayal. The fear that I could be next. Our posse was tight knit, until it wasn't, but to murder an former brother in cold blood?
"Got a name, anything? Cause if what you're saying is the case then saddling up with me is out of the question. I doubt your father's last wish is to see you reunited with him so soon; I can't help you, and now it seems we've got nothing more to talk about." My voice hardened. Was such sudden coldness necessary? It didn't sit right, but putting a little girl in harms way was far more unforgivable. "The best thing you can do is let it go. I can help you contact a relative, or get you set up with someone safe..."
Her eyes narrowed like a rattlers, sharp with venom, vitriol and most evident: hurt. "Let it go? They shot my momma and daddy down like animals and rode off laughing too." Violet's self-assured exterior deflated and she was a little girl once more; hot tears traced the contours of her cheeks and piddling onto her black dress. "How the hell am I supposed to forget that?"
I had no answer to that. And when she looked back at me all that showed were the same green eyes that her father had worn in life. The eyes of his youth. They glimmered like precious gems, cut with passion and purpose.
"So you want an old murderer, me, to go out there and track this man down," I said matter-of-factly, letting my words hang between us before turning away; a small crowd had gathered near the two holes waiting for Jackson and his wife to be lowered into their final resting place. It wasn't that my shooting hand had grown stiff. Working the door at various saloons over the years kept me spry enough but this was different.
Victoria was well beyond her years, and despite the misty redness of her eyes, the girl became aplomb and hardened like a diamond, "I want a friend of my father's to do the right thing, and I wanna be there when you do it."