Read Online And Kill Them All by J. Lee Butts - Free Book Online

behind him and fogged up around his near imperceptible feet. The gritty miasma gave him the bizarre appearance of somehow floating, wraithlike, above the dusty earth that swirled beneath those booted and spurred canoes at the ends of his legs.
    He ran the flicking forefinger of one hand back and forth beneath his droopy moustache. The shaggy ornament completely obliterated his top lip and had the appearance of a living animal trying to invade a gap-toothed mouth. Ragged, wispy tip ends of the moustache dangled below his jawline and swayed in the morning breezes. That’s when I realized that the pair of us had gone and got pretty damned seedy, and in right quick fashion, too.
    â€œYou hearin’ all that commotion out yonder, Lucius?” Boz said, then took a seat on the edge of the rugged porch, within arm’s length of the dog. He grunted, rubbed his damaged leg, then ruffled the animal’s huge head. He patted the beast’s furry back, then leaned against one of the crude props that offered some highly questionable support for the shaky veranda’s off-kilter roof.
    One shoulder lodged against my sleeping quarters’ rough-cut doorframe, I gazed in the same general direction as Boz and the dog. Didn’t need much in the way of heavenly illumination from a brain-frying sun to know exactly what lay out there in the receding darkness.
    Swear ’fore Jesus, the entire earth appeared to spool away from the edge of the house’s front veranda to the farthest reaches of the known, and unknown, world. A seemingly endless sea of hilly, reddish-brown, man-killing sand and dirt marched from our crude, leased home’s front stoop to the Tinaja, Woods Hollow, and Glass Mountains, some hundred and twenty miles west and beyond.
    In my personal estimation, the land, while bleak in ways hard to describe, was beautiful beyond any other place I’d ever seen. And mostly unoccupied. Few other people, if any, lived for miles around. Our nearest neighbor, as I knew of anyway, had a spread about twelve miles to the south and east, over near the Del Rio road . And that’s exactly the way me and Boz had wanted it from the beginning.
    â€œYeah,” I muttered, then fished makings from atop the chest of drawers just inside the bedroom door and set to rolling myself a smoke. “Yeah. I heard the shooting, Boz. Woke me from a right nice nap. Well, ’bout as good a one as I can hope to get these days, anyhow.”
    â€œUh-huh. Me, too.”
    â€œMust’ve spent the entire time I did manage to doze a bit dreamin’ ’bout some of the times we’ve had in the past. Good and bad.” I stoked the roughly wrapped ciga-reet to life and took a single, lung-filling puff. Smoke cloud from the burned tobacco rolled out with my words. “Come to wakeful consciousness thinking for sure we’d just run ole Jasper Pike to ground. Hadn’t so much as entertained a single thought about that murderous brigand in at least two years. He came back to me in a dream. You remember Jasper, Boz?”
    An unintelligible, guttural grumble came from my friend’s general direction. Unable to distinguish for certain whether the wordless response originated with the man or the dog, I flicked ash from the end of the hand-rolled with a little finger and continued with my unsolicited, meandering musings.
    â€œDon’t see how you could forget a gob of dung like Pike. Evil bastard murdered a boatload of innocent folks before we finally pulled him down. Always took a certain amount of pride in the fact that we’re the ones what brought him to book.”
    Boz scratched a spot on his back by twisting from side to side against the porch prop. “Hell, yes, I remember Jasper,” he grunted and continued his bearish exercise. “Cussed hard to forget a belly-slinkin’ snake like that ’un. His kind of gutless bastard makes a Christian body wonder why God bothers to stack piles of