Six Bullets

Book summary

In the post-Civil War Wyoming Territories, three desperate outlaws—an escaped convict, a card shark, and a politician battling addiction—embark on a high-stakes robbery. Unbeknownst to them, their crime sets a relentless pursuer on their trail: Albert Binax, a notorious killer driven by a strict moral code. Survival becomes a deadly gamble.

Excerpt from Six Bullets

Wyoming Territory, 1870

It took a year for Albert Binax to develop an immunity to bee stings. He hadn’t set out to become a bee-keeper, but he found a certain relaxation with the insects he hadn’t experienced with anything else. Even the time he’d spent in the opium dens, while certainly pleasurable, left him in a manufactured haze he found uncomfortable. There was no way to turn it off. You simply had to wait for it to fade. He’d paid women for their services, and while again pleasurable, it lacked the element he’d craved. It left him longing. He’d courted Ms. Finnigan, and though she truly cared for him, the feeling wasn’t reciprocal. However, building hives and harvesting honey were all enjoyable activities that started and ended at his choosing and satisfied his ennui.

Although the venom from the stings was painful, he’d tolerated them. He’d been shot with bullets and arrows and weathered them. Though he bore plenty of scars, grew stiff often, and moved with pro-nounced maneuvers, he had a pleasant disposition, especially when he had the chance to smoke a pipe and work with the bees. Eventually, he could withstand the stings and barely noticed them. He never shirked his responsibilities or cut corners so that he could tend to the bees. He owed Mr. Nathanson too big of a debt.

As the sun set on the day, he extinguished his pipe and surveyed the clay hives to ensure they didn’t need anything more.

***

The smell of manure had stopped bothering Ephraim a long time ago, but it was impossible not to notice it. While the odor was certainly unpleasant, he no longer felt ill. Not to mention, he doubted they’d be interrupted meeting in the hayloft above the livery. The smell would keep most people away, and if someone wanted to stable their horse for the evening, the hoofbeats on the stones approaching the entrance would provide an early warning.

Ephraim felt another lightning bolt in his leg and stretched it out the best he could. Though he could still walk, his muscles would often tighten, and it would flare up often enough that he sometimes wished it had been amputated. When the Partisan Ranger Act had been announced, Ephraim and his brother Jed joined up. They promised equal pay—the same as the soldiers—without having to fight on the front lines. Instead, he and Jed would be gathering intelligence and stealing supplies.

The first few missions went smoothly. He’d been with a solid, no-nonsense group: Ephraim, Jed, and the McFleer brothers. They became seasoned raiders and documented enemy troop movements with pinpoint accuracy.

However, a few months into their excursions, Jed started to get unhinged. The group would only resort to violence if necessary, but now Jed would draw his revolver at the slightest provocation. Ephraim had tried his best to placate his brother, but Ephraim knew it was just a matter of time before something irrevocable happened.

Ephraim shut his eyes and inhaled the smell of manure, and when he opened them, he was back on the train.

Pennsylvania, 1868

The plan had been relatively simple. The unit learned that the 11:30 to Pittsburgh would be pulling a mu-nitions car. Jed and Ephraim would board at different entrances and make their way to the penultimate vehicle, which was supposed to be the one in question. The last car, full of passengers, was not to be in-convenienced. The group had agreed none of those passengers were to be menaced.

Once the munitions car had been separated, Jed and Ephraim would escape the now-stalled train and head toward the quarry about half a mile away, where the McFleer brothers would be waiting with horses.

However, on the day, shortly after Ephraim met up with his brother in the munitions car, Jed pulled his revolver and entered the last passenger car. He had a bandana over his face, as Ephraim did, so no one would be able to identify them.

Ephraim took off after Jed.

Ephraim entered the car while Jed was mid-sentence barking orders to one of the passengers. The first few rows of people had seen the gun and raised their hands. A woman screamed, and it brought the attention of the rest of the car.

“Hand over that watch!” Jed said to a middle-aged and slightly overweight fellow in a suit. The man looked like he could have been a banker; a suit with a vest. It made sense—the sight of the man had riled Jed since the bank had foreclosed on their mother’s home a few years previously.

Ephraim had tried to intervene before things could escalate, but it all seemed to be happening too quickly. He managed to say “Wait,” but Jed had already begun to pistol-whip the man. Fortunately, Ephraim found his ability to move, grabbed Jed by the neck, and pried him from the now-unconscious vic-tim.

The banker’s face was bloodied, and it was difficult to tell how badly he’d been hurt. The constant scream from a nearby patron did little to keep anyone calm. Ephraim raised his weapon, and the lady quieted. He wouldn’t have shot her, but his bluff worked. None of the passengers moved. Even without being armed, Ephraim knew this wasn’t the class of people used to physical altercations.

Over the following year, Ephraim would piece together what had happened after he’d raised his weapon. The only thing that he could be certain of: he’d felt pain. When he tried to remember any of the details, he couldn’t confirm whether they were accurate. His mind would try to reconstruct the scenario, but he could never trust his suspicions.

He was fine one moment, and then the pain. He lost consciousness, and when he awoke, he was in a hospital. He learned he’d been arrested and would stand trial in absentia while he recovered. His brother Jed was being held in jail while the trial commenced. The McFleers had been shot and killed during their apprehension.

Early on, he couldn’t remember exactly when he was visited by a court-appointed counsel. The man was clearly flustered, and it gave him a buffoonish quality. The lawyer had spectacles that had sunk to the tip of his nose yet somehow never fell. The lawyer’s name was Merryweather.

Merryweather spoke rapidly and provided a lot of information, frequently going on tangents to explain definitions of legal jargon. Since Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus, it would be more difficult. Ephraim and Jed weren’t technically Confederate army, so they weren’t being charged with treason. They were being charged with aiding, so they would be facing a military tribunal. Of course, this was in conjunction with armed robbery. It didn’t look good, but Merryweather would do what he could.

A deputy had been stationed in Ephraim’s hospital room. During the trial, the deputy would read from a newspaper that depicted the events of the entire incident on the train. He had just learned to read, so the deputy’s pronunciation was often wrong, and he spoke slowly. However, Ephraim would learn one of the passengers had been a member of the track-and-field team while attending Yale. In fact, the man had been a champion javelin thrower. According to the journalist, the man on the train, Mr. Reginald Dunlop, who, amid an armed train robbery, threw a railroad spike at one of his assailants. The robber, later identified as Ephraim Odom, was brandishing a firearm and callously threatening the livelihood of more than one passenger. “As the arrow shot by Paris to slay the mighty Achilles, Dunlop’s aim had been true, and the spike buried itself in Odom’s quadricep.” After the deputy asked a doctor to help him spell more than a few words, he inquired as to who Achilles and Paris were, as well as what a “quadricep” was. The doctor could help with the spelling and pronunciation. It wasn’t until word had made it to another wing of the hospital that a historian was able to give them the answer to the identities of both Paris and Achilles.

While reviewing Ephraim’s condition, the doctor suggested not only that Ephraim was lucky to be alive, since the spike had missed his femoral artery, but also that Ephraim hadn’t developed sepsis or any complications that would require the amputation of his leg.

It was difficult to feel lucky while in so much pain. That’s what Ephraim had been thinking, although he didn’t say it. He simply thanked the doctor and agreed. Ephraim spent most of the time sleeping or listening to the wheezing of the man in the neighboring bed. The rest was spent listening to the deputy regale him with information from the trial and how the only reason Ephraim was in the hospital was so he could heal enough to be hanged when the jury rendered a guilty verdict. The deputy would laugh at his insight, and the same joke never seemed to grow stale to him. Like with the doctor, Ephraim would nod sheepishly. He couldn’t afford to be confrontational in this position. Ephraim wasn’t at one hundred percent, but his defensive instincts were still intact. He would continue to mend, listen to the deputy’s gallows humor, and hope somehow Ephraim and Jed would find salvation.