Read Online A Bullet for Billy by Bill Brooks - Free Book Online Page A

road leading south.
    It was half a moon that night, enough to see by but not easily be seen unless somebody was looking for them.
    When they reached the south road Billy said, “Okay, let’s ride these sons a bitches like they was horses we just stole.”
    â€œWe did just steal them,” Sam said.
    â€œMy goddamn point exactly,” Billy said with a grin.
    The found Longly’s place easy enough. Just a lone little shack looked like a shadow in the half light of night, sitting just off the road three miles outside of town.
    â€œWhat if he keeps a dog?” Sam said. “And it sets to barking loud.”
    â€œThen I feel sorry for that old dog,” Billy said and pulled the Remington out of his waistband, and holding it like that, knowing what he might end up doing with it, gave him a whole other feeling than he’d ever had before.
    â€œYou best pull your piece too.”
    Sam followed suit and they rode up to the house slow, thinking any minute some hound would come out barking and snarling. And such would have been the case, but Longly’s hound had been bitten a week earlier by a rattlesnake several times and died an anguished death. The man Longly had not yet replaced him, much to Billy and Sam’s good fortune and not to Longly’s.
    They tied off their mounts out front, and Billy stepped up to the door with Sam across from him, both of them holding their pistols at the ready. Billy rapped hard at the door and kept rapping till a light came on inside.
    â€œWho is it?” they could hear a man calling from within. “Who the hell is there and what do you want?”
    Billy shouted, “It’s the law, open this goddamn door!”
    It opened slowly and Billy stuck the muzzle of his revolver in Longly’s face and walked him back into the room with Sam following.
    â€œYou’re the brats of that whore Frost was living with,” he said, and Billy struck him across the ear with the barrel of Jardine’s pistol, and Longly yelped like someone had scalded him.
    Sam was feeling nervous.
    â€œGive me all your money, you son of a bitch,” Billy commanded. “What you owe my family for taking the life of a decent man.”
    Longly held his bleeding ear, the blood dripping through his fingers and down his hand to his wrist.
    â€œI’ll give you shit and call it money, is what I’ll do, you mealymouth little peckerwood.”
    Billy struck him again, across the collarbone, and dropped the man to his knees. Billy thumbed back the hammer and put the muzzle to the man’s head and said, “You think I won’t, just go ahead and call me another name and find out.”
    Longly relented, and Billy let him get a tin boxfrom under his bed and take out the money he had in it, then Billy ordered Sam to take a rope and tie Longly to the bed, and Sam did what Billy told him. And once he had Longly tied to the bed, Bill went into the small kitchen and broke off a table leg and come back in and set to whaling on the bound man till Longly stopped screaming, passed out from the blows.
    â€œI reckon playing all that baseball come in handy, huh?” Billy said, standing there breathless.
    â€œYou killed him,” Sam muttered.
    â€œNah, I didn’t. I just busted him up good. Look, he’s still breathing fine. Let’s get.”
    So they left with Longly’s money and the man from Uvalde’s horses and Jardine’s pistols and Longly’s canned peaches and a slab of fatback bacon and coffee in a burlap poke tied to Sam’s saddle horn, and Billy wanted to burn the place to the ground with Longly still in it, but Sam talked him out of it.
    And they rode hard for a time but then Billy said, “We ain’t safe nowhere this side of the border, we best go to Old Mexico, cross the river and get on down to where they don’t care who we are or what we’ve done.”
    And along the way they sustained themselves by