Her mouth was twisting and working like a child’s, and there was water in her eyes.
“Shut up, yourself!” Gooseneck roared back at her, and his thumb raised the hammer of the gun that threatened her. “I’m doin’ the talkin’. I killed her for—”
Kewpie bent forward. Her left hand went under the hem of her skirt. The hand came up—empty. The flash from Gooseneck’s gun lit on a flying steel blade.
The girl spun back across the room—hammered back by the bullets that tore through her chest. Her back hit the wall. She pitched forward to the floor.
Gooseneck stopped shooting and tried to speak. The brown haft of the girl’s knife stuck out of his yellow throat. He couldn’t get his words past the blade. He dropped one gun and tried to take hold of the protruding haft. Halfway up to it his hand came, and dropped. He went down slowly—to his knees—hands and knees—rolled over on his side—and lay still.
I jumped for the Englishman. The revolver Gooseneck had dropped turned under my foot, spilling me sidewise. My hand brushed the Englishman’s coat, but he twisted away from me, and got his guns out.
His eyes were hard and cold and his mouth was shut until you could hardly see the slit of it. He backed slowly across the floor, while I lay still where I had tumbled. He didn’t make a speech. A moment of hesitation in the doorway. The door jerked open and shut. He was gone.
I scooped up the gun that had thrown me, sprang to Gooseneck’s side, tore the other gun out of his dead hand, and plunged into the street. The maroon roadster was trailing a cloud of dust into the desert behind it.