Kill or Die by William W. Johnstone

“You got a billy club stashed away somewhere?” he said.
    The man reached under the bar and produced a two-foot chunk of turned wood as thick as a man’s wrist. “Teak,” the bartender said.
    Toohy nodded and stepped toward the rear door. “Have fun,” Lilly called out after him.
    Â 
    Â 
    Randy Collis grinned as he heard Bonifaunt Toohy’s footsteps approaching the outhouse. He buttoned up, turned his head and said, “I knew it had to be you, Mary. And now I’m gonna kill you.”
    Toohy said nothing as Collis, smiling his anticipation, stepped out of the outhouse and said, “You’re wearing a gun like a man. Let’s see if you—”
    Bringing the club from behind him Toohy swung and the iron-hard teak slammed against the side of Collis’s head. The youngster shrieked and staggered back, his left ear a bloody mess. Toohy, all his pent-up rage searing like acid to the surface, went after him. Groggy but still on his feet, Collis went for his guns. But Toohy was faster. He smashed the club into the man’s head for second time and Collis’s already mangled ear erupted, jetting blood. The kid dropped to his knees and managed to draw with his right hand, but he was slowed by his injuries. Toohy kicked the Colt out of the youngster’s hand and then coldly, systematically, he beat Collis to a pulp. His face a scarlet mask of blood and shattered bone, Collis fell on his back and then rolled over, groaning.
    â€œI hate my given name, boy, but I hate the name you give me even worse,” Toohy said. He grabbed Collis by the back of his shirt and dragged him into the saloon where Lilly had pinned the other youngster and the girl in place with his gun.
    Toohy dragged the now unconscious Collis and dropped him at his friends’ feet. “Take what’s left of that outside,” he said.
    â€œDamn you, where are his guns?” the youngster said. He had a crop of pimples on both cheeks.
    â€œIn the cesspit,” Toohy said. “When and if he comes to, he can go get them.”
    The kid was about to say more, but when he looked into Toohy’s eyes he knew that would be a big mistake.
    After Collis had been half dragged, half carried outside, Toohy laid the club on the bar. “That needs cleaned,” he said to the bartender. “It’s got Randy Collis all over it.”
    â€œDid you need to beat him that bad, mister?” the bartender said.
    â€œNo, I didn’t,” Toohy said.
    â€œBon, I’d rather have you as a friend than an enemy,” Lilly said.

CHAPTER TWENTY
    Sam Flintlock spent the next two days and nights in the swamp on an island of dry land where the vanished Indians, perhaps hundreds of years before, had erected a totem as tall as a man, carved with fish and water birds, its top crowned with a yellowed human skull.
    Flintlock neither ate nor drank. He sat with his back against the totem, his head bowed in thought, unmoving as a carved rock. The alligators avoided the place as though remembering that they’d once been hunted there and the long-legged marsh birds searched for frogs among the hyacinths and kept their distance.
    By the morning of the third day Flintlock felt weak. He was thirsty and had a pounding headache. The sun slanting through the tall columns of the cypress made the swamp look like the nave of a Gothic cathedral and the morning mist drifted like incense from a censer.
    Old Barnabas sat opposite Flintlock and opened the huge book he carried; a foot thick bound with leather and studded iron. The old mountain man wore his usual buckskins, but the top hat with the goggles on the crown remained.
    â€œAh, here it is, on page nine hundred and sixteen,” Barnabas said. “I figured he would be entered in the Book of the Damned.”
    â€œGo away, Barnabas,” Flintlock said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
    â€œDon’t you want to know who he