“How’s your heart, sonny?” I asked him.
His tone sharpened. “Take him, Van!” he barked to a bushy-haired husky. The semicircle surged toward me.
Even with the evidence of my own eyes, I guess I still didn’t believe it. I hesitated long enough before pulling the.38 that I had to duck the first charging teen-ager. I had to pull it with my left hand because I had been facing the speaker instead of Van. The second kid hit me with a fullback block that rolled me over in the dust. A pair of boots landed on my hand. I felt fingers breaking, but I didn’t lose the gun. I switched it to my right hand as I came up on my knees. The kid in the rodeo clothes was a dozen yards away. He was standing there, laughing.
I put a slug into his upper lip, right under his nose. Lip, nose, and teeth disappeared in a red blotch. He went backward into the shed wall, rebounded, spun around, and flopped on his back in the dirt. A thin scream filled the night air while his heels drummed the ground, kicking up dust.
The flat crack of the.38 had again frozen movement around me. “He — he shot Wally!” a voice said incredulously.
“Your friend can dish it out, but he doesn’t seem to be so good at taking it,” I said to the bushy-haired Van as Wally’s screams continued to furnish a high-pitched background. My left hand was throbbing, but I didn’t look at it. I was watching Van.
The sound of my voice brought him out of his state of shock. “You bastard!” he exclaimed hoarsely. “You’re for it!” He started toward me again. I put a bullet into his left shinbone. He went down as though ax-stroked. Another of the group was in motion. I snapped a shot into his right collarbone. He pitched heavily to the ground.
The four still on their feet had halted again in grotesque poses of arrested movement. I climbed erect and walked toward them, reloading as I went. The left hand hurt like hell, but I managed. For a second the clickity-click of metal on metal drowned out the crackling of the burning logs. Closest to me was a skinny, mean-faced character with a scraggly beard. “Still think your fun was worth it?” I said to him. He swallowed hard but said nothing. His eyes were on the gun. I held it out and showed it to him more plainly. “Arm or leg?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. “Arm or leg?” I repeated.
“Arm or leg what?” he asked. His voice was a rasping whisper.
“You’re going to take one in an arm or a leg. Like a souvenir of the occasion. Take your pick.”
His features contorted in frustrated fury and his voice thickened to a screech. “Fuck you, you goddamn —!”
He gasped and then shrieked as the bullet smashed his right kneecap. He crawled in the dirt, dragging the leg, his continuing screams blending with Wally’s. I turned to the next closest. “Arm or leg?”
“Arm!” he got out in a choked gasp. I ticked off his left upper biceps. He yelped and pivoted in a tight, doubled-over circle before he plunged to the ground.
The other two were running. I got the first in an ankle. The crack of the gun seemed to elevate him from a springboard. He did a one-and-one-half forward somersault before he plowed up the dirt with his face. The last one was beyond accurate placement range. I let go at his arse, and he slid on his side, wailing, both hands grabbing at his buttocks. He’d run far enough so that he ended up almost outside the perimeter of light.
I looked around. No one was going anywhere. I walked over to Hazel, who was just getting to her feet. She had been cradling the old man’s head in her lap. Her face was white. “He’s gone,” she said tonelessly. “Reload that thing again and give it to me. I’ll give each one myself.” I shook my head. “Give me the gun!”
“No gun, Hazel. You’ve got to live here.”
“The hell I’ve got to live here!” Her mood changed swiftly. “Your hand’s broken, isn’t it? It’s a good thing it wasn’t your right hand, or we’d have been dead, too. Unpleasantly.”
I didn’t say so, but it wouldn’t have made that much difference. My left-handed shooting isn’t all that bad.
Her mind was ranging ahead. “You’ve got to get away from here before the sheriff comes.”
She was right about that. Even if the kids didn’t talk, my staying around to answer police questions could open up a nasty can of worms. The gang could hardly talk without incriminating themselves, but neither could I, and not only about what had just taken place. My visit was definitely over. I went to the pickup and backed it up as close as I could to the old man’s body. Hazel and I slid him into the back of the truck, and I chained up the tail gate again.
“What about these creeps?” Hazel asked, gesturing at the battlefield. The various screams had died down to moans.
“They’ve got a car out in the brush somewhere. Let them get themselves to a hospital. What are you going to tell the sheriff?”
She flared up like a roman candle. “That I’ll see to it that he’s beaten at the next election if I’m still around here! And that’s all. He can draw his own conclusions.” She had seen me favoring my left hand when we lifted Gunnar Rasmussen’s body into the pickup. She took my hand and examined it, shook her head, removed a kerchief from her throat, and bound the fingers together. “That’s all I can do. I know something’s broken.”
“I’ll get it set,” I promised.
We got into the pickup. I took the wheel and drove back to the ranch house at a much slower pace than Hazel had set en route to the feed shed. During the first part of the return trip she spoke only once. “Where do they get the hate?” she asked quietly.
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
We were almost at the house when she spoke again. “I suppose this means I won’t see you again?”
I’d been thinking about that. “When things quiet down here and you’re sure they’re paying no attention to you, why don’t you come down to the city for a visit?”
“I’d like that,” she said promptly. “When?”
“I’ll call you.”
“Just be sure you do.” She was silent for a moment. “Go ahead and tell me it’s none of my business …” She hesitated, then resumed. “Earl. Damn it, I’ve got to get used to that name.” She turned to face me squarely as I parked the pickup in the ranch yard. “How are you fixed for cash?”
“Fine,” I lied.
“You know that no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to spend even the income from what Lou Espada left me?”
“I know. I’m saving you for my old age.”
She put her hand on my arm. “Why don’t you … retire?”
“Retire? Retire to what?”
“To a life of peace and quiet!” she said spiritedly. “Damn all men, anyway! Always running against the bit —”
I opened the pickup’s door and slid out from under the wheel. “I’ll call you,” I repeated. “Take care, now.”
“Be careful,” she called after me. I was already moving toward my car.
I drove out the ranch road to the highway.
At the gate I stopped and painfully reloaded the.38 again, then put it back into the glove compartment.
I remained in Ely only long enough to have my fingers set. Two were broken. “If you hadn’t told me you’d dropped a tire on the back of that hand, I’d have said it looked like the imprint of a bootheel,” the doctor said.
“You M.D.'s have vivid imaginations, Doc,” I told him.
I got back out on the road and headed for San Diego.
CHAPTER THREE
In Dago I had a room that was just a room. I stayed in it until I got over the worst of the awkwardness in dealing with the splint on my left hand. There’s nothing like a couple of broken bones, no matter how insignificant, to make a man aware of his mortality.
I didn’t really know why I was in San Diego. I usually sign on as a tree surgeon somewhere when I’m
