10
Twenty minutes later, as the bloated orange moon struggled above the buildings of the town like a pregnant woman climbing a steep hill, a lone vaquero led a mule along Hill Street in the direction of the Sheriff’s office. This end of Hill Street was a pit of shadows. There was a little light around Green Heart, but even the park (which would have been thronged, noisy, and brilliantly lit in any other year) was mostly empty. Nearly all the booths were closed, and of those few that remained open, only the fortune-teller was doing any business. Tonight all fortunes were bad, but still they came-don’t they always?
The vaquero was wearing a heavy serape; if this particular cowboy had the breasts of a woman, they were concealed. The vaq wore a large, sweat-stained sombrero; if this cowboy had the face of a woman, it was likewise concealed. Low, from beneath that hat’s broad brim, came a voice singing “Careless Love.”
The mule’s small saddle was buried under the large bundle which had been roped to it-cloth or clothes of some kind, it might have been, although the deepening shadows made it impossible to say for sure. Most amusing of all was what hung around the mule’s neck like some peculiar reap-charm: two sombreros and a drover’s hat strung on a length of rope.
As the vaq neared the Sheriff’s office, the singing ceased. The place might have been deserted if not for the single dim light shining through one window. In the porch rocker was a comical stuffy-guy wearing one of Herk Avery’s embroidered vests and a tin star. There were no guards; absolutely no sign that the three most hated men in Mejis were sequestered within. And now, very faintly, the vaquero could hear the strum of a guitar.
It was blotted out by a thin rattle of firecrackers. The vaq looked over one shoulder and saw a dim figure. It waved. The vaquero nodded, waved back, then tied the mule to the hitching-post-the same one where Roland and his friends had tied their horses when they had come to introduce themselves to the Sheriff, on a summer day so long ago.
11
The door opened-no one had bothered to lock it-while Dave Hollis was trying, for about the two hundredth time, to play the bridge of “Captain Mills, You Bastard.” Across from him, Sheriff Avery sat rocked back in his desk chair with his hands laced together on his paunch. The room flickered with mild orange lamplight.
“You keep it up, Deputy Dave, and there won’t have to be any execution,” Cuthbert Allgood said. He was standing at the door of one of the cells with his hands wrapped around the bars. “We’ll kill ourselves. In self-defense.”
“Shut up, maggot,” Sheriff Avery said. He was half-dozing in the wake of a four-chop dinner, thinking of how he would tell his brother (and his brother’s wife, who was killing pretty) in the next Barony about this heroic day. He would be modest, but he would still get it across to them that he’d played a central role; that if not for him, these three young ladrones might have-
“Just don’t sing,” Cuthbert said to Dave. “I’ll confess to the murder of Arthur Eld himself if you just don’t sing.”
To Bert’s left, Alain was sitting cross-legged on his bunk. Roland was lying on his with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. But at the moment the door’s latch clicked, he swung to a sitting position. As if he’d only been waiting.
“That’ll be Bridger,” Deputy Dave said, gladly putting his guitar aside. He hated this duty and couldn’t wait to be relieved. Heath’s jokes were the worst. That he could continue to joke in the face of what was going to happen to them tomorrow.
“I think it’s likely one of them,” Sheriff Avery said, meaning the Big Coffin Hunters.
In fact, it was neither. It was a cowboy all but buried in a serape that looked much too big for him (the ends actually dragged on the boards as he clumped in and shut the door behind him), and wearing a hat that came way down over his eyes. To Herk Avery, the fellow looked like somebody’s idea of a cowboy stuffy.
“Say, stranger!” he said, beginning to smile… for this was surely someone’s joke, and Herk Avery could take a joke as well as any man. Especially after four chops and a mountain of mashed. “Howdy! What business do ye-”
The hand which hadn’t closed the door had been under the scrape. When it came out, it was clumsily holding a gun all three of the prisoners recognized at once. Avery stared at it, his smile slowly fading. His hands unlaced themselves. His feet, which had been propped up on his desk, came down to the floor.
“Whoa, partner,” he said slowly. “Let’s talk about it.”
“Get the keys off the wall and unlock the cells,” the vaq said in a hoarse, artificially deep voice. Outside, unnoticed by all save Roland, more firecrackers rattled in a dry, popping string.
“I can’t hardly do that,” Avery said, easing open the bottom drawer of his desk with his foot. There were several guns, left over from that morning, inside. “Now, I don’t know if that thing’s loaded, but I don’t hardly think a traildog like you-”
The newcomer pointed the gun at the desk and pulled the trigger. The report was deafening in the little room, but Roland thought-hoped-that with the door shut, it would sound like just another firecracker. Bigger than some, smaller than others.
Good girl, he thought. Oh, good girl-but be careful. For gods’ sake, Sue, be careful.
All three of them standing in a line at the cell doors now, eyes wide and mouths tight.
The bullet struck the comer of the Sheriff’s rolltop and tore off a huge splinter. Avery screamed, tilted back in his chair again, and went sprawling. His foot remained hooked under the drawer-pull; the drawer shot out and overturned, spilling three ancient firearms across the board floor.
“Susan, look out!” Cuthbert shouted, and then: “No, Dave!”
At the end of his life, it was duty and not fear of the Big Coffin Hunters which propelled Dave Hollis, who had hoped to be Sheriff of Mejis himself when Avery retired (and, he sometimes told his wife, Judy, a better one than Fatso had ever dreamed of being). He forgot that he had serious questions about the way the boys had been taken as well as about what they might or might not have done. All he thought of then was that they were prisoners o’ the Barony, and such would not be taken if he could help it.
He lunged for the cowboy in the too-big clothes, meaning to tear the gun out of his hands. And shoot him with it, if necessary.
12
Susan was staring at the yellow blaze of fresh wood on the comer of the Sheriff’s desk, forgetting everything in her amazement-so much damage inflicted by the single twitch of a finger!-when Cuthbert’s desperate shout awakened her to her position.
She shrank back against the wall, avoiding Dave’s first swipe at the oversized serape, and, without thinking, pulled the trigger again. There was another loud explosion, and Dave Hollis-a young man only two years older than she herself-was flung backward with a smoking hole in his shirt between two points of the star he wore. His eyes were wide and unbelieving. His monocle lay by one outstretched hand on its length of black silk ribbon. One of his feet struck his guitar and knocked it to the floor with a thrum nearly as musical as the chords he had been trying to make.
“Dave,” she whispered. “Oh Dave, I’m sorry, what did I do?”
Dave tried once to get up, then collapsed forward on his face. The hole going into the front of him was small, but the one she was looking at now, the one coming out the back, was huge and hideous, all black and red and charred edges of cloth… as if she had run him through with a blazing hot poker instead of shooting him with a gun, which was supposed to be merciful and civilized and was clearly neither one.
“Dave,” she whispered. “Dave, I…”
“Susan look out!” Roland shouted.
It was Avery. He scuttled forward on his hands and knees, seized her around the calves, and yanked her feet out from under her. She came down on her bottom with a tooth-rattling crash and was face to face with him-his frog-eyed, large-pored face, his garlic-smelling hole of a mouth.
“Gods, ye’re a girl,” he whispered, and reached for her. She pulled the trigger of Roland’s gun again, setting the front of her serape on fire and blowing a hole in the ceiling. Plaster dust drifted down. Avery’s ham sized hands settled around her throat, cutting off her wind. Somewhere far away, Roland shrieked her name.
She had one more chance.
Maybe.
One’s enough, Sue, her father spoke inside of her head. One’s all ye need, my dear.
She cocked Roland’s pistol with the side of her thumb, socked the muzzle deep into the flab hanging from the underside of Sheriff Herk Avery’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The mess was considerable.
13
Avery’s head dropped into her lap, as heavy and wet as a raw roast. Above it, she could feel growing heat. At the bottom edge of her vision was the yellow flicker of fire.
“On the desk!” Roland shouted, yanking the door of his cell so hard it rattled in its frame. “Susan, the water-pitcher! For your father’s sake!”
She rolled Avery’s head out of her lap, got to her feet, and staggered to the desk with the front of the serape burning. She could smell its charred stench and was grateful in some far comer of her mind that she’d had time, while waiting for dusk, to tie her hair behind her.
The pitcher was almost full, but not with water; she could smell the sweet-sour tang of graf. She doused herself with it, and there was a brisk hissing as the liquid hit the flames. She stripped the serape off (the oversized sombrero came with it) and threw it on the floor. She looked at Dave again, a boy she had grown up with, one she might even have kissed behind the door of Hockey’s, once upon an antique time.
“Susan!” It was Roland’s voice, harsh and urgent. “The keys! Hurry!”
Susan grabbed the keyring from the nail on the wall. She went to Roland’s cell first and thrust the ring blindly through the bars. The air was thick with smells of gunsmoke, burned wool, blood. Her stomach clenched helplessly at every breath.
Roland picked the right key, reached back through the bars with it, and plunged it into the lockbox. A moment later he was out, and hugging her roughly as her tears broke. A moment after that, Cuthbert and Alain were out, as well.
