A Man Called Bone 4 (Patreon)

But Sofia had asked for a margarita and so he brought her the drink as she liked it: salt shaker, lime, and two glasses of mezcal margarita. Then he went back behind the bar, to the Greener shotgun he kept out of sight, in case there was trouble.

Sofia slipped a dainty stiletto from her stocking and used it to cut into the lime, showing the man how to take the drink she’d ordered him. She wasn’t sure he didn’t know, but at the moment, it sat before him like a burnt offering to some pagan idol—no way of telling if it had been accepted or not.

“If you buy a drink for every fellow that comes in here, it’s a wonder the place is so empty,” the man said. Even having been lubricated, his voice was a quiet rumble, deep and pitched far down in Sofia’s body, as if she were hearing it down in her guts instead of her ears.

“I am just being hospitable to a stranger in our town—one I hope to know better.” She held out a slice of lime as if she expected him to shake it, but after a coy laugh, only set it down on the rim of his glass. “Sofia Vergara.”

“Jeremiah Bone,” he replied evenly.

“Boone?” she questioned.

“Bone.”

Sofia shrugged. “My English, it is not always the best. But then I rarely need words to say what I am trying to say.”

“What are you trying to say?” Bone replied instantly, flattening her innuendo.

Sofia took the salt shaker and demonstratively ladled it out along the rim of her glass. “You killed four men, but only brought back three horses. I was just curious as to why. Little things like that—they irritate me.”

“And that was worth the cost of a drink to find out?”

“You tell me. You haven’t drunk yet.”

Bone took the salt shaker from her and imitated her in salting the rim of his own glass. “One of the horses got snake-bit. Had to put it down. Then had to improvise.”

“You should’ve brought the snake along. They make good eating.”

“Snake’s still alive. It was just going by its nature.”

“And the four men? Were they not going by their nature?”

Bone rolled his shoulders, more working a kink out of them than shrugging. “Maybe. Maybe God made them cattle rustlers. But then, I’m the way I am. So I did what I done by nature. If the law ain’t got no problem with that, don’t know why I should.”

Sofia picked up another slice of lime, holding it before her like she was toasting Bone. “You are cold-blooded, senor. But at least your blood is still in your veins.”

Bone shook his head. “Not cold. Realistic. A man can either accept what’s there or not.”

“And now I am here. Do you accept me, senor?”

Before Bone could reply, Sofia licked a taste of salt from the rim of her glass. Took a quick swig and chased it with a suck on the lime. Bone watched with a thousand-yard stare; Sofia wasn’t sure if it was a rebuff or a response.

She wouldn’t say his eyes were glazed over, but he seemed almost… sated. Like a drunkard with a full leg or a gambler who’d cashed out. Even when he spoke, there was a stony silence to his body, a void, unreturning of any of the attention or entreaties she made of him.

Many men would’ve already asked how much it would cost to possess her, simply from her sitting with them. It was hard to tell if he cared, but impossible to believe that he would make polite small talk if he didn’t desire her. Four dead men… caramba!

She picked up the slice of lime she’d skewered on his glass and held it up to his lips. “Lick. Then drink. Then suck.”

Moving like a clock that’d been run down for years before being wound again, Bone picked up his glass. His tongue slashed over the salted rim, then he drank. When Sofia prodded the lime slice towards him in offering, he took it between his lips and sucked it. His saliva wetted Sofia’s fingertips. She ran the dampness of her forefinger across his cheek, coming away with plenty of the fine layer of dust that adhered to his skin.

“Now that we’ve washed out your insides, let’s do something about the outside,” Sofia purred. “How’s a hot bath sound?”

“I don’t know, lady. How does it sound?” Bone returned.

She caressed his cheek with all of her hand. “Three dollars. And I guarantee you get clean.”

“Steep,” he said simply.

“Worth it,” she replied. “Hot water’s on the house. And my girls’ll launder your clothes while you’re not using them.”

“Hot to make a sale,” he observed with his thundering rasp.

“Can’t have you shaking off your dust all over town. You’d make a bad impression.”

Bone reached out and picked up another slice of lime. “Let me finish my drink. Insides aren’t all washed up yet. You got hot water when I come up, I’ll soak.”

“It’ll be wet when you’re ready, senor Jeremiah.”

“Bone,” he said, turning his glass. Now a section of the rim that was still salted faced him. “Just Bone.”

And he licked before he drank and sucked.

Chapter 2

It was a near thing, but Bone stayed downstairs, ordering another whiskey neat. The margarita was good, but it lacked the strong burn to take the sting of the desert out of his mouth. And the woman was tempting—hell, she was temptation.

Maybe it was just the long days without seeing one and the nearness and friendliness of Sofia now, but he thought she’d be what came to mind when he pictured a woman from now on. The example. The truest possible femininity that his mind could grasp.

But he knew himself just a little too well. Knew the roughness in himself and the meanness. It came up and it went down. Like a horse’s lather after being rode hard—needed to be cooled, needed to be watered. Couldn’t be stalled before then.

And the killings… he couldn’t say it was the killings that had gotten his lather up. It might sound good, but with a drink in his hand Bone was too honest for that. It was the desert.

Three weeks in the desert, eating in the saddle, living from drink to drink. The sameness of it. The heat. The touch of your own sweat, which you grew to hate, just like you hated the sunlight you couldn’t hide from and the feel of the horse between your legs. Until there was nothing in the desert you couldn’t hate.

So you got by on hate, telling yourself that with each step, you were closer to something that wouldn’t make you feel this unremitting anger. Hour after hour, day after day, not taking any joy in where you were and not even being able to look forward to any, only hoping for a stop to the boiling sand and the endless sameness and the unrelenting heat and the constant movement.

Couldn’t waste time in the desert. Had to keep moving. When you bunked down for the night, God willing in a bit of shade, it seemed like no rest at all, just a pause and you were back to the ceaseless hating.

And at the end of all that, when you finally tracked down the reason for all that hate, you weren’t supposed to enjoy killing?

By then, it was the same thing as living.

But the heat had died down with the hate; Bone drank in the cool of the saloon right alongside the last of the rough whiskey. But there was no chill to it, though at least that sickly, sweaty heat was gone, replaced with a flare like a match’s flame.

His anger simmered low and Bone knew he could keep it out of sight now while he attended to the urges of his body. Giving the whore what she wanted, or was gracious enough to pretend she wanted, without flaming so hot that he burnt her.

It was laughable, having any pretense to scruples after the release he’d felt killing those four men, but Bone didn’t like the thought of scraping off much more of himself. Even if they were silly ideas like not hurting women, not shooting a man in the back. In his line, it seemed like circumstances would dictate he be a backshooter sooner or later. But not today.

And if the day didn’t come where he had to harm a woman before he was in the ground… well, that’d be some consolation when his soul burned. Just like knowing that the men who’d done this to him were burning in the same fire, and as soon as he could arrange it.

The thought sparked with bitterness, but it didn’t resonate. He didn’t see red. The crackling energy of the desert had left him. Now he could breathe. Bone felt his heart beating and his blood flowing in his veins and knew that his heart wouldn’t derail like a runaway train, his veins wouldn’t surge like rivers flooding their banks. Calm and cool and collected, he’d give the whore the treatment that stupendous body cried out for.

The stillness and the drink calmed his flesh. He stopped sweating—that pervasive fever of heat, heat like a sickness that infected you. The flowing air of the saloon, pushed in and out by the shadows inside and the blazing sun outside, dried the sweat on the inside of his clothes. So as he got up, the dust that’d been caked on him flaked off—broke away with every flex of his wiry muscles, trailing after him like the mist of a ghost.