“Jesus Christ, let’s get out of here,” Cane yelled, as the next round of bullets pinged about them, one ricocheting off a rock and clipping a few strands off his horse’s matted tail.
“Ain’t no time for that,” Chimney said, jerking his Springfield from the scabbard on his saddle. “The sonofabitch is already comin’ back around.” They were ratcheting shells into the chambers of their guns when Montgomery swooped over again, sending the horses and Cob into a panic as several more bullets splatted in the dirt around them. As the plane began to make yet another circle, Chimney told Cane, “Just aim for the front.”
Montgomery, at that moment, was growing enraged with Whistler, who was struggling to reload. An entire magazine emptied and not a single hit. He decided that he was going to have to shoot the bastards himself. Though there was a machine gun mounted on the front of the plane, the synchronization was out of whack and Whistler had been at a loss as to how to fix it. If Reese engaged it, there was a good chance he’d shoot the wooden propeller off. He was bored, but not that bored. Berating the grease monkey with every curse word he could think of, he leaned heavy on the stick and pulled a Colt .22 out of his coveralls. To do any good with it, he was going to have to get close enough to count their goddamn teeth, assuming the ingrates even had any. He looked down and saw two of them raise rifles and point them at the plane, which only incensed him even more. In all the time he’d been alive, nobody had ever had the audacity to raise their voice to him, let alone threaten him with a gun. For Christ’s sake, he was a Montgomery; his father played bridge with the Rockefellers, his mother had served as Grand Madam of the Heirloom Ball!
The mechanic yelled a warning just as Montgomery heard the whap of the bullet, felt it rip through his neck and exit the other side below his ear. More surprised than hurt, at least for a brief second, he dropped the pistol to the floor of the cockpit and reached for his throat with both hands. Behind him, he heard Whistler fire off another round just before the plane shot upward and then leveled out for a few seconds, seeming to nearly come to a stop a thousand feet in the air. Hot blood gushed from the holes in his neck and poured over the front of his coveralls. Everything was happening too quickly. He tried to take a breath and choked. Another clot of blood gushed from his mouth, and he pitched forward as the plane began to nosedive, banging his face against the front panel. He heard the mechanic yell something, felt him pounding frantically on his back. He thought about how the girl he’d left in the club car would probably fuck the butler and the cook out of pure joy when she heard about his demise; and he felt a little regret roll over him just then, because, really, she hadn’t been so bad. It was he who had—
“Poor fellers,” Cob said, as they watched the plane smash into the ground a few hundred yards away, scooping out a short trench with its nose before bursting into a ball of flames. “I guess they wasn’t from no fair, was they?” Then they heard a scream, and Cane jumped on his horse and started to ride toward the wreck. “What the fuck are ye doing?” Chimney yelled, just before the plane exploded again, tossing bits of burning flesh and canvas into the air. The funnel of black smoke was visible for miles around, but it didn’t matter. They were long gone by the time the law got there.
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