knew exactly what to do with it, too.
The Freedom Party man skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, so abruptly that he flailed his arms and rocked back on his heels. The barrel of the. 45 had to look the size of a railroad tunnel as Reggie aimed it at his midriff. 'I told you, you don't want to try that,' Reggie said.
'You'll pay for this,' the scruffy veteran said. 'Everybody's gonna pay for fucking with us. You're going on a list, you-' He decided not to do any more cussing. Running your mouth at a man with a pistol when you didn't have one of your own wasn't the smartest thing you could do. Even a Freedom Party muscle man could figure that out.
'Get lost,' Bartlett told him. He gestured with the. 45 to emphasize the words. 'Go on down to the corner there, turn it, and keep walking. You do anything else, you'll be holding up a lily.'
Face working with all the things he dared not say, the other man did as he was told. Bartlett finished tearing down the posters, then went on to the trolley stop. His only worry was that the Freedom Party man had a weapon of his own, one he hadn't had a chance to use. But the fellow had talked about beating him up, not shooting him. And he didn't reappear.
Up came the trolley, bell clanging. Reggie tossed a dime into the fare box and took a seat. The dime should have been five cents; prices weren't quite what they had been before the war. But they weren't what they had been afterwards, either-he wasn't paying a million dollars, or a billion, for the privilege of riding across town to his flat.
Nobody on the trolley car had the slightest idea who he was or what he'd just done. That suited him fine, too. He had a chance to relax a little and look out the window. Before long, the trolley passed more of those VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! posters. Reggie's lip curled. He couldn't rip them all down, however much he wished he could.
Seven and a half years after the Great War ended, not all the destruction U.S. aeroplanes had visited on Richmond was yet repaired. Plenty of burnt-out and bombed building fronts stared at the street through window frames naked of glass; they might have been so many skulls peering out through empty eye sockets. The damnyankees made my home town into Golgotha, Bartlett thought. One of these days, we'll have to pay them back. But how?
He shivered, though the crowded trolley was warm with humanity. That was how the Freedom Party thought, and how it got its members. Haven't you had enough of war? he asked himself. Asked that way, he could hardly say no.
He got off at the shop nearest his flat. For supper, he fried up a ham steak and some potatoes. After he did the dishes-he was a fussy, neat bachelor-he read for a while and went to bed. He wouldn't have minded a wireless set, so he could listen to music or a football game, but not on the salary of a druggist's assistant.
The next day did bring a chilly drizzle. Work at the drugstore went much as the previous day had. He didn't bother telling his boss about the fuss over the posters. Jeremiah Harmon had no use for the Freedom Party, no, but Reggie didn't want him fussing like a mother hen, which was just what he would have done.
'Hey, you!' somebody called to Reggie when he walked to the trolley stop that evening. It was the veteran he'd quarreled with. He wore a disreputable hat to keep the rain off his face.
His hand went to the. 45. 'Told you I didn't want you bothering me,' he said.
'No bother, pal,' the fellow said. He pasted on a smile as he came up to Bartlett, and he made sure he kept his hands in plain sight. 'We've all got to live and let live, ain't that right?'
Reggie stared. 'That's not how you talked yesterday,' he said, his voice hard with suspicion. 'What's wrong with you now?'
'Not a thing,' the Freedom Party man said. 'I just got a little hasty, is all. You went through some of the things I did, you'd get hasty, too.'
'I went through plenty myself,' Bartlett said. 'You want to go through it again? That's what that damn Featherston's got in mind.'
'No, pal. You don't understand at all,' the veteran said. He still had on the same ancient tunic he'd worn the evening before.
Noticing that, Reggie didn't notice the footsteps coming up behind him till they stopped. That made him notice, and made him start to turn, his pistol coming out of the holster. Too late. He heard three shots. Two slugs hammered him in the chest. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, reaching for the. 45 that had fallen from his fingers.
The veteran scooped it up. 'Nice piece,' he said, and then, grinning, 'Freedom!' Reggie heard him as if from far away, and further every moment. He didn't hear the man and his friend running away at all, or anything else ever again.
Three guards came up to Cincinnatus Driver's cell. Two of them stood in the corridor, their pistols aimed at his midsection. The third opened the cell door. 'Come along,' he said.
'Where you takin' me?' Cincinnatus asked.
'That ain't none o' your business, boy,' the guard snapped, for all the world as if Kentucky were still part of the CSA, not the USA. 'Come along, you hear?'
'Yes, suh.' Cincinnatus got up off his cot and came. He'd quickly learned how far he could go with these guards before they stopped talking and started persuading him by other means. One beating had been plenty to drive the lesson home: not just the beating itself, but how much they enjoyed giving it to him. If they ever decided to beat him to death, they would do it with smiles on their faces.
'Hands behind your back,' the guard told him. He obeyed. The guard clicked handcuffs onto his wrists. They were cruelly tight, but Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut about that, too. Complaining just got them tightened more.
The guards marched him along the corridor. He recognized some of the men sitting or lying in their cells. Some, black like him, were Reds. Others, whites, were men who'd been Confederate diehards during the war and probably belonged to the Freedom Party nowadays. Maybe some of the other prisoners recognized him, too. If so, no one gave a sign.
'This way,' one of the guards told him. They led him across the exercise yard he normally saw for an hour a week, down another corridor, and into an office. A tall, backless stool sat in front of the desk. Luther Bliss sat behind it. The guards slammed Cincinnatus down on the stool, hard.
'Here we are again,' the head of the Kentucky State Police said.
'Yes, suh,' Cincinnatus said. 'I want a lawyer, suh.' He hadn't tried that one in a while. The worst the other man could tell him was no.
Bliss' smile never touched his hunting-dog eyes. 'If you was still in Des Moines, maybe you could have one,' he answered. 'But this here's Kentucky, and the rules are different here. This is one of the reclaimed states, and we aren't about to put up with treason or rebellion. You mess around with that stuff and you get caught, we take care of you our own way.'
'I wasn't messin' around with nothin' here,' Cincinnatus said bitterly. 'I was just livin' my life up in Iowa till you got that sorry Hadrian nigger to write that lyin' letter to get me down here in the first place. You call that fair… suh?'
'I had you once before,' Luther Bliss replied in meditative tones. 'I had you, and I was going to squeeze you, and Teddy Roosevelt made me turn you loose. He made me pay you a hundred dollars out of my own pocket, too. I have… a long memory for these things, Cincinnatus.'
Cincinnatus hadn't forgotten that, either, though Bliss hadn't mentioned it till now. 'Do Jesus, Mr. Bliss, you want your hundred dollars back, I'll pay it to you. Just let me wire my wife an'-'
Bliss shook his head. 'I get paid back with interest.'
'I'll pay you interest. I got the money. I done pretty good for myself up there.'
'I don't want your money. I get paid back my kind of interest.'
He was what he was. His kind of interest involved pain and misery. That was what he dished out. That was what the people who told him what to do wanted him to dish out. If, every once in a while, he dished them out to people who didn't really deserve them, the people who told him what to do probably didn't mind. They might even figure he deserved a little fun on the job.
Like a hunting dog taking a scent, Luther Bliss leaned forward. 'Enough chitchat. About time we get down to
