Deadwood Dick

"This isn't the way to my heart."

"Oh... I think it is it..."
"Well not in the metaphorical sense."

"I was thinking something a little more literal..."

The two naked forms rolled in the bed, a knife hugged between them.

"I think I get the point."

"Would you stop with the puns!"

Exasperation. Not something a femme fatale normally felt.

"I couldn't even if I tried."

"Try harder."

"I think I'm quite hard enough."

With a wicked crunch the knife pierced his stomach and slid up into his ribcage.

A gasp. Some vomit. A little screaming muffled by a pillow.

"Keep that fucking mouth shut."

The warm blood pooled around her knees and disgust was visible in her face.

Death tells you a lot about a person. Particularly, it tells you how they react to stressful situations. The Few had a saying, "a man can only be judged by his reaction to trauma, not the trauma inflicted" and Marisma believed it.

Licking the semen from her fingers, the woman in red retreated into the mits of the warm shower that awaited her. How like a womb it was. This was her virginal kill, and it was reflected in her posture as she washed herself. Sex then death. This is how the Few did it. She was covered in fluids foreign to her and her face all but screamed the violation she felt inside.

Nothing more than a ball against the tile of the floor wrapped up in blood and sex and water.

"That wasn't so much a little death¹ my dear..."

The figured staggered and slumped against the wall of the bathroom, it's virginal white innocence shattered by this intruder as a red brushstroke painted the wall where he fell into a heap gripping his gut. He was an ocean of blood wrapped in human flesh and it was pouring out through his fingers. Viscera and things best left inside were spilling out and he was doing all he could to keep it in. A bloodied silver revolver rested in his other hand. He'd lost the cutting grin she'd felt in his voice before and his intrusion into the room was as stark as the sudden influx of colder air into the warm womb she had created here.

A gritty bang jerked her head back against the tile and she kissed the floor, chipping a tooth from the force, as her body gave a sickening death lurch forward from her kneeling position.

Rubbing it clean, the naked man held his silvered revolver close to his bleeding gut. The point was moot as his lifeblood spilled out over it again but the flow would stop. It always did. The grimacing stubble around his mouth spoke of a ephemerial longing for it to to continue.

"Just flow out. Just a little more. Just for forever and I'll be dead."

Wishes. Just wishes. If wishes were actions he'd have resisted the sexually charged kiss that landed him in the black widow's bed. He looked at her slumped form, still kneeling with her blood flowing around the drain. It danced in a swirling infinity that told him that not even her pulse now disturbed its flow. He shivered and gripped himself. His body was covered in his own fluids and it clung to his leg hair like scabs. Nothing he could do could get the image of this one's face out of his mind now. He'd see¹ the end of a few years before he could think cleanly of women again. This wasn't the first and it wasn't the last. He'd been doing this for so long it make his sick to think of it. Decades ago he'd been jaded. He'd passed that and now he was something far more wry. The cops would be here in a minute. Maybe ten. This was Vegas and shit like this happen more than he'd like. Kissing his revolver he blew out the back of his skull. Nothing. Nothing. Then life again.

~ ~ ~

"Another one?"

"Another one."

"You've gotta stop meeting girls like that."

"I've gotta stop meeting girls."

"That bad?"
"That bad."

"Want a drink?"
"When has that ever helped?"

"When has that ever hurt?
John Reid shook his head and let the younger man hand him a glass of something that stank like paint thinner in a crystal glass. How like him this glass was. He was good for the world on the surface but something harmful sat inside. With a swift jerk of his head he knocked it back and immediately flashed back to the jerking motion of his own head just hours before.

"Now, John, lay it on me."

Lay it on me... what a modern phrase. It was something he hadn't heard until a few seconds ago if he measured time like they measured time. Death and life, just an endless waltz waiting for the song to end when the sun finally set.

"Casino. Whisky. Girl. Knife. Bang."

As he spoke he pulled the trigger on his own figure and blew his out brains out once again.

"Jesus John... still a cowboy. Cops?"

"Cops."

"And her?"
"Dead."

"You sure."

"Sure."

"Sure or yes?"

"Sure."

Visibly disturbed, his young financial manager straightened his vest. Bill always fidgeted like that when he was nervous for himself. These questions had nothing to do with the gaping head wound under John's hat, just Bill's own future.

"Jesus John... just Jesus. I thought we were passed this."

"I thought we were too. Your job is just to manage my assets."

"Your getting drunk and banging a serial killer is a threat to those assets!"

"They were a threat to something."

John's eye winked almost involuntarily. "And how did you know she was a serial killer?"

"Because you don't drink enough to go to bed with just anyone."

"True, but I drank enough to go to bed with her. She needed to think I was an easy mark."

"Yeah? Well then what."

"We fucked."

"John. I mean how."
"Like animals."

"John..."

"We fucked until she pulled a knife out of a cavity in her left breast. She ripped it right out and tried to stab me."

"And?"
"And she did."
"That explains the stink of blood and sex you reek of."

"That it does... so I got up and shot her. End of story."

"That's not what the police said."

"Oh, I shot myself in the head. Must have slipped my mind."

"And?"
"I woke up in a morgue a few hours later, fucked the mortician and left on my own recognizance."

"Wait, why the mortician?"

"She was already on top of me. It was a fantasy of hers. I imagine it scared the hell out of her when I started thrusting back."

"I... bet."

With a hiss John finished another glass of whiskey.

"You can't live like this John."

"I can't die like this either so I can't see the difference."

"That's your problem John. It's all a joke to you."

"No Bill, I'd be laughing if it was a joke. It's a goddam tragedy, but I passed carrying around the time we won World War two."

Bill just pinched his nose and shook his head. John remembered how young he was. Bill was just pushing 30 and thought he knew everything about everything. John had come to the conclusion that information was worthless as long as it kept being created a century ago, soon after his first death. He had found himself completely inept at everything shy of cattle ranching and drinking himself to death and left the current fads up to those who cared about the state of things as they were.

The two men sat in the low wet cave that served as refuge for times like this. John Reid would have to die and someone else would have to spring up to take his place. He could see Bill thinking about the paperwork that would need to be forged to bring him back to life.

"You could be from Spain this time."

"Spain? Why Spain? I hate Spain."

"And if I recall, Spain hates John Reid too."

"How about England? I'd love to fuck some brits."

"I don't care as long as it's not America."
"I was only joking Bill. Of course I'll stay in the States."

"Do you know how hard it is to secretly move your assets when you die?"

"Do you know how little I care Bill? That's why I pay you a small fortune."
"No, you pay me that because your a lonely old bastard in need of someone to pour his whiskey and listen to his stories of emotional masochism. I do the financial stuff because I don't want to hear you complain about a lack of money."

"True enough."

"So what's the name going to be this time?"

"Wyatt Earp?"

"Come on."

"William Henry McCarty, Jr.?"

"No Juniors, too hard."

"Jack Cody?"
"You sure have a think for old cowboy comics."

"They are not so old for me."

"I suppose not."

A long silence sat between them.

"Russell Crowe?"

Bill broke and began to laugh.

"I'll take care of it John. Don't worry about it."

"Do I still get to fuck some brits?"

"Yeah John, we can arrange for you to do that for a bit."

1 La petite mort, French for "the little death", is an idiom and euphemism for orgasm.