No White Knight

I shut up quick and give her silence.

Finally, she stops, like she knows what she’s looking for, and here it is.

It’s just a few lines on a page.

One of Mark’s silly poems, I guess.

But I feel my world shift when I read the title.

He Shot First.

No fucking way.

It’s like the sky opens up with a message from the great beyond. What Mark’s been trying to tell us all this time.

Crowding Libby, both of us barely breathing, we read it together.

Mark Potter will never go down as a good poet.

It reads almost like an elegy, a lament for the dead, or even a song.

It’s a story about a man finding a cursed blood stone here in this dead little town and shooting a man who tried to double-cross him and kill him.

The hero of the poem realizes all the rock can ever bring is greed and death.

He vows he’ll throw it off a cliff…but there’s something almost ominous in the way it casts its spell over him, and he keeps it instead.

He cuts away a fragment to try to break the curse, turning it into something good by grinding a piece of it down into polished gemstones, setting them into a necklace for his daughter.

Giving the stone to the stars, and the stars to her eyes, he writes.

Libby catches a breath, one hand drifting up to her little necklace and the polished red bits inside.

“Holy Toledo. So I’ve been…wearing a piece of the stars around my neck my whole life, and I never realized it?” she whispers, her voice breaking. “A piece of this?”

“Seems like it.” I squeeze her tighter. “But look what he keeps coming back to, sweetheart. What he says over and over again. Bostrom shot first.”

She lifts her head, looking up at me with eyes that glimmer with something that might almost be hope. “If…if Bostrom shot at Dad first…”

“It was self-defense, Libby,” I finish, while her eyes widen. “He wasn’t a bad man. Mark shot that shady fuck defending himself, and maybe his family too. Who knows what he’d have done if he’d killed your old man out there with no witnesses. Mark had to save his own life, maybe even others.”

Libby goes quiet. “Better than nothing, I guess, but it’s still just a poem. One-sided, even if I believe it. Not proof.”

Langley clears his throat, sounding almost embarrassed.

“Yeah, about that…I need to show y’all something.” He ducks his head. “Come out here, please.”

He turns to lead us toward the saloon with a murmur to mind your step as we move around the evidence markers and crime scene tape.

Inside, the whole saloon’s been covered over with tape and forensics markers—including something on the wall I hadn’t noticed before, marked by a bit of orange tape and a scrap of paper.

“There,” Langley says, nodding toward the wall.

It’s a bullet hole.

I don’t even need to get closer to tell.

Someone shot there, all right, and it looks like it came from a gun fired not too far from the remains of Gerald Bostrom.

Libby goes pale. “He…he said find the gun.”

“And we did, Miss Liberty,” Langley drawls. “The boys pulled an old Smith & Wesson out of the debris behind the bar, crushed under the spot where a shelf collapsed. Probably went flying when he got shot. Near as the forensics folks can piece together, someone was standing right where that bullet hole was. Dead guy shot at ’em, missed, and hit the wall right where we pulled out a slug matching that Smith & Wesson. And then the guy standing here shot back, leaving the fella in the suit to rot with a shotgun slug in his chest.” He squints at Libby.

My hands go to her shoulders, holding her up, because I can tell she’s about to faint.

“Easy, honey,” I whisper.

“Mark was real fond of shotguns for defending the homestead, wasn’t he?” Langley asks.

“Y-yeah!” Libby says, pressing her fingers over her mouth sharply, breathing in a hard rattle. “He s-sure was.”

There’s only a half-second warning in her eyes spilling over before she breaks.

The woman just busts out sobbing, turning and flinging herself into me, and no matter how tiny she is, she nearly knocks me clean over.

I catch her with an oof, then wrap my arms around her tight, my chest seizing. “Libby, what’s wrong—”

“I’m happy!” she belts out, even as she shows her joy by beating her fists against my chest, overwhelmed with emotion. Not gonna lie, she’s smacking me like a little twister, but I’m not letting her go. “Oh my God. I knew it. Knew he was a good man, I knew it, I knew it…Gerald freaking Bostrom shot first.”

That’s when Libby starts jumping up and down, using my shoulders for balance.

I can’t help but smile, seeing her this happy.

“Yeah, he did,” I say and kiss her hair, letting her release all the pent-up emotion. “Now we know it for a fact, and everything’s gonna be a-okay.”