reason we've put up with each other as long as we have-well, that and the screwing, anyway.'
He'd hoped to anger her, but found he'd failed. She also laughed, and seemed to gain strength from it. 'Yes, that and the screwing,' she said. 'I'll miss you. I'll be damned if I won't. But I won't miss the Freedom Party. Since you're staying in, I have to cut you loose. Grady Calkins showed me once and for all there's no controlling those people.'
'I got into it thinking Jake Featherston needed controlling, too,' Kimball said. 'He doesn't. But the Yankees want to control him, and that's a fact.'
'Featherston's clever,' Anne admitted. 'But he can't do everything himself. And if he can't control his people, he can't do anything at all.' By the way she talked, controlling was the be-all and end-all.
Kimball supposed it was natural she thought that way. She'd spent her whole life till the Red uprising controlling a plantation, controlling money, controlling everyone around her. Her ancestors had done the same thing for a hundred years before her time. She was, in fact, one of the aristocrats against whom Jake Featherston had campaigned.
With a shrug, Kimball said, 'Well, yeah, a bigger egg than Jake wanted got busted, but you can't blame the whole Freedom Party for Calkins.'
'Why can't I? Everyone else does,' Anne said. 'And there's a lot of truth in it. With all the brawling, with the stalwarts with the clubs, with the riots during the campaign in '21, where else was the Freedom Party going but towards shooting a president?'
Uneasily, Kimball remembered keeping a stalwart in white and butternut from taking a shot at Ainsworth Layne when the Radical Liberal candidate spoke in Hampton Park. Even so, he said, 'You're making-the whole country's making-it out to be bigger than it is. Sure, we've lost some folks for now on account of what happened down in Birmingham, but they'll be back.'
Anne Colleton shook her head. 'I don't think so. And that's the other reason I've gotten out of the Freedom Party-I never back a loser. Never. I think the Party's name will stink all across the CSA for years to come, and I don't want any of that stink sticking to me.'
'You're wrong,' Kimball told her. 'You're dead wrong.'
Now she shrugged. 'I'll take the chance.'
'Nothing fazes you, does it?' he said, and she shook her head again. He stepped toward her. 'Last kiss before I go?'
He watched her consider it. Mischief filled her eyes. 'Why not?' she said, and held out her arms.
When their lips met, he wondered if she'd bite him instead of kissing. But her malice was subtler than that. She put everything she had into the kiss, reminding him of what he wouldn't be getting any more. She held him tight as if no clothes separated them, grinding her crotch into his.
'Jesus!' he said, his voice hoarse, when he had to take his mouth away from Anne's to breathe. She laughed, delighted with the effect she'd created. His hand cupped her breast. 'Last lay before I go, too?'
'No,' Anne said deliberately, and knocked the hand away. 'Good-bye, Roger.'
Rage ripped through him. 'Why, you goddamn little tease,' he rasped, and shoved her against the bed. She let out a startled squeak as she landed on her back. 'I'll give you something to remember me by-see if I don't.' He sprang on her.
Years before, he'd realized trying to take her by force wasn't a good idea. Since then, he never had tried. He'd never needed or wanted to try. Now… If she thought he'd just walk away after that kiss, she could damn well think again. Whatever he'd realized years before was dead as the Ericsson, dead as Tom Brearley.
It shouldn't have been, for his fury overpowered not only good sense but also caution. Anne might have been startled when he pushed her onto the bed, but she didn't stay that way longer than a heartbeat. With exquisite timing, her knee came up between his legs and caught him exactly where it did her the most good.
He howled and doubled up and clutched at himself, as any wounded animal might have done. Anne twisted away from him. He couldn't possibly have stopped her, not for the first few seconds there. 'Now I think you'd better go,' she said coolly.
He didn't want to take her any more. He wanted to kill her. But when he looked up, he discovered she'd had more in her handbag than a one-dollar banknote. She aimed a revolver straight at his head. He hadn't the least doubt she would pull the trigger if he moved in any way that did not suit her.
'Get off the bed,' she said. He had to obey, though he still walked doubled over. The pistol tracked him. She'd killed before, helping to put down the Negro rebellion. No, she wouldn't hesitate now. Iron in her voice, she went on, 'Go to the door, get out, and never come back.'
At the door, he paused. 'Can I wait till I can straighten up?' he asked, not wanting to publish his humiliation to the world.
He thought she'd send him out in anguish, but she nodded and let him have a couple of minutes. Then she gave a peremptory gesture with the pistol. Out he went. He still wasn't moving well-he felt like bloody hell-but, if he walked like an old man, he didn't walk like a wounded old man.
He made his slow, painful way back to his flat without meeting anyone he knew, for which he thanked God. 'That would be just what I need,' he muttered as he walked spraddle-legged up the stairs, 'to run into Potter and Delamotte again.' He grunted. Anne had hurt him worse than they had when he brawled with them-not in so many places, but worse.
He poured himself a tall whiskey, and then ran the bath half full of cold water. He shivered when he sat down in it, but the steam radiator made the apartment tolerably warm and the whiskey made him tolerably warm, so he didn't think he'd come down with pneumonia or the Spanish influenza. And the cold water helped numb his poor, abused balls-or maybe that was the whiskey, too.
At last, he let the water run down the drain. After cautiously drying, he put on the loosest drawers and baggiest trousers he owned. Then he went back to the kitchen and poured out some more whiskey. He didn't want food. The knee Anne had given him still left him faintly nauseated.
He drank from the second glass of whiskey. 'Stupid bitch,' he said, as if someone in the room might disagree. 'Miserable stupid bitch.' He took another big sip from the glass. He wished he'd wrung her neck, back there at the hotel. But he hadn't got the chance. Say what you would about her, Anne Colleton took a back seat to nobody when it came to nerve.
The glass was empty again. He refilled it. Might as well get drunk, he thought. What else have I got to do? Even if he never saw Anne again, he'd have no trouble getting laid. He knew that. He'd never had any trouble getting laid. Why, then, did he feel like a man whose tongue kept exploring the empty spot where a wisdom tooth had been before the dentist got his forceps on it?
'Dammit, we were two of a kind,' he muttered. 'We are two of a kind. She's just being stupid about the Party, that's all. She'll come around.' He nodded. 'She gives me half a chance-hell, she gives me even a quarter of a chance-I'll horn her into coming around.' With better than two glasses of whiskey in him, it not only sounded simple, it sounded inevitable.
Someone knocked on the door. Kimball hurried to open it. 'There she is already, by God!' he said happily. Of course she wouldn't stay away.
But the woman who stood in the hallway was darker and plainer and tireder than Anne Colleton. 'You are Mr. Roger Kimball, the naval officer?' she asked.
'That's right,' he answered. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize she had a Yankee accent-she sounded a little like Clarence Potter.
'Oh, good,' she said. 'I'm so glad I found you.' As Anne had before, she reached into her purse. And, as Anne had before, she pulled out a pistol. Two bullets had slammed into Roger Kimball's chest before she said, 'My husband was on the Ericsson.'' She kept firing till the revolver was empty, but Kimball never heard the last few shots.
XIX
Sylvia Enos sat in a Charleston, South Carolina, jail cell, wondering what would happen to her next. Looking back on it, she decided she shouldn't have shot Roger Kimball. Now she would have to pay for what she'd done. Try
