The sun rose behind the towering mesas of Red River Ridge, bathing the wide frontier in an orange glow. In the shadows of the natural structures, body parts lay scattered around a heaving, manic Catherine Cartwright. The head of the last teenager she’d decapitated rolled to a stop into the first ray of dawn, and dissipated like mist in high heat. Cat’s sigh matched the whisper of smoke that rose briefly from the hard packed earth where the head had come to rest.
The sheriff rode upon the scene astride his weathered, dappled mare. Cat clutched her machete in one hand and the last gun with ammo in it, her trusty derringer, in the other. Her peacemaker was lost somewhere amidst the piles of viscera and stray limbs. Her pig sticker jutted out of the torso of a raven-haired girl, abandoned in her haste to escape the girl’s gleaming, bared teeth.
Cat’s auburn hair clawed madly at the wind that rushed around the scene. Her bright, hazel eyes rolled wildly in her head. Adrenaline spent, she dropped her weapons and collapsed to the ground, splashing into the pool of blood at her feet.
Sheriff Adam Roberts gaped at the massacre before him. None but the cowboys that rode through these parts had ever taken a cotton to Catherine Cartwright, what with her running a whore house right there in the middle of town, but he’d have never pegged her for a killer. Not in a million years.
He dismounted, cuffed the crazed woman that was just starting to come around, and tossed her across his horse. He walked them both back to town, locked Cat in a cell, and sent for the preacher.
“Catherine Cartwright, you stand accused of murder. What is your plea?” Pastor William Burns served as the town’s judge, and his wife, Annie, as jury.
From her seat on the hard cot in the cramped cell, Cat muttered, “I had to do it. I told you all before, them kids weren’t right. I did what had to be done.”
Annie’s lips drew together in a tight frown. No pity for the wicked. No mercy for those who did not feel remorse.
The sheriff adjusted his guns, and hitched his pants up as far as they would go under his gut. He crossed his arms in front of himself and waited for the judge to proclaim his decision.
“Catherine Cartwright,” Pastor Burns droned again, “you are hereby convicted of four counts of murder. Furthermore, you are sentenced to death by hanging at dawn tomorrow. I will return to hear your final words, should you choose to repent at that time.”
The ominous trio left the rambling woman to make her peace.
“I had to do it.” She murmured until she passed out, exhausted and unaware of anything beyond the horrors of the events of the night before.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the cries of a spooked horse woke Cat from a deep, but troubled sleep. Though she was still played out, the bit of rest she’d gotten had done some good for the clarity of her mind. She sat up on the cot and rubbed her eyes with the filthy heels of her hands. She glared at the bloody grit beneath her fingernails, then at the stony walls of her prison.
They’d tossed her in the cell at the end of the hall. Three cells separated hers from the front office where the deputy was likely sleeping off his latest binge. Theirs wasn’t much of a jail, but four cells were plenty for this one horse town.
“Hey,” she croaked out. She cleared her throat, and did her best to summon the voice that had melted plenty of men’s constitutions before, and tried again. “Hey, Jesse!”
He snorted awake, dropping his boots to the dusty, plywood floor. “Whassat?”
“Jesse, come here.”
His spurs jingled with every thud of his boots. Cat had always thought such things were silly and frivolous. Like a child with a set of shiny bells at Christmas time.
