boatman, groaning.
As those two had landed, Titus’s wide, fleshy whore burst from the shadows to straddle Kingsbury, starting to pummel the sides of his head with her big, soft fists. Back and forth Nina rocked the river pilot as Bass painfully dragged his legs under him, put his hands out to steady himself, and laid one atop something round. Bringing it up before his eyes for all of a heartbeat, not consciously recognizing what it was. Yet in some dim, primal way realizing he held in his hands Kingsbury’s fate.
Unsteadily Bass rocked backward, his head feeling like a burlap bag loosely filled with a load of stream- washed rocks. Righting himself, he rose to one leg. Closing one eye seemed to help him keep the fat whore in focus as he shakily got to his feet and careened forward, his hand swinging that leg busted from one of the broken chairs back and forth before him. Over his head he raised it, then brought the leg down across the woman’s shoulders. Time and again he struck her on the back, with no effect but that she turned and cursed him, trying unsuccessfully to grab him with her left hand.
“You li’l pissant!” she screamed, fending off the chair leg with one fleshy arm while she choked Kingsbury beneath the other. “I’ll cut your no-good pizzer off when I’m done here!”
In that instant he hated the mocking cruelty in her eyes, the angry curl to the folds of skin around her mouth. And struck out at them blindly, sneaking in beneath her arm to lay the hardwood leg against the whore’s cheekbone with a smart crack. Her face immediately opened up in a long, dark line that spurted a glistening spray over the yellowish lamp-lit paleness of her skin. He dragged the lathe-turned hardwood leg back behind his head for another blow.
Spitting blood from the corner of her mouth, her eyes became even more menacing as she turned on him, rising from Kingsbury’s body. “Now I’m gonna chop your balls off and feed ’em to you while I cut your heart out!”
As she was lumbering to her feet, he swung, connecting with the top of her skull just above the ear. Nina’s head snapped to the side, she rocked unsteadily, stunned as Bass brought the chair leg to his left and swung it back at her head with even more force. She growled at him, both her arms held out in his direction, hands opening and closing like claws before her eyes began to glaze. A third blow—this time driving it under her chin. Blood darkened her lips as her eyes half closed. Nina weaved atop Kingsbury, both arms still outstretched to grab at the youngster, fingers clutching, releasing, clutching again, with nothing caught between them but the smoky air.
Bringing the chair leg over his head, Titus brought it down on Nina’s skull as her eyes rolled all the way back, their sockets showing nothing but whites. With a loud snap her neck popped backward, and she toppled her great bulk into a heap beside the river pilot, like a forest slug spilling off the stem of some ground ivy.
Trudging forward one step, then another, Bass wobbled over to her, holding the chair leg high all the time, suspended there as he stared blearily at the whore sprawled on the floor … when the room erupted again with women’s screams.
One of them screeched right in his ear, “You killed Nina!” just as she landed on his back and they both went down in a heap against the overturned bar.
At their feet Kingsbury clambered slowly to all fours, gasping for breath, dragging it in noisily, labored and wheezing, as would a drowning boatman who was just pulled from certain death beneath a turbulent river. Hames pulled his knife as he came up, clutching one arm against his side with a pasty grimace.
“Get off him!” Kingsbury ordered.
Immediately the whore riding Titus’s back stopped pummeling Bass with her fists, whirled, and lunged for Kingsbury, baring her teeth like a fighting dog’s. As she flung herself at the river pilot, the whore fell against the long blade of his belt knife—stumbled suddenly with eyes wide, her mouth moving without a sound—then stared down at his hands gripping that knife pressed into her belly, up to the hilt.
With a grunt of great exertion, Kingsbury dragged the blade to the side, splattering the youth beneath him with the whore’s warm blood, then quickly snapped his head forward, cracking it against the woman’s forehead smartly. She lurched back, only then pulling herself off the knife blade as the front of her dirty dressing gown darkened like the underbelly of a thunderstorm.
“Let’s get!” Root hollered.
As the dying whore crumpled beside him, Bass turned slowly, numbed, to find Reuben holding down the Negro bartender, a knife at his throat. The slave’s white eyes muled angrily as he glared up at the boatman, his great coffee-colored hands spread in surrender, but his face bearing nothing but undisguised scorn for the victor. Backing slowly away before he inched the blade from the glistening black skin of that muscular neck, Root finally straightened as Heman Ovatt limped over, having held a pistol on two of the women through the last minutes of their whorehouse fight. Kingsbury hobbled up beside Reuben, half-bent at the waist, his left arm wrapped around his middle as he wheezed in pain with each shallow breath.
“Get up,” the pilot ordered Bass, his voice strangely hollow. It reminded Titus of how a person might sound if cast down a well. Hames turned to Ovatt and Root as they all three surveyed the scene. “Any of you know who them two was?”
With a nod Heman answered, “Think I seen ’em afore, yeah.”
“I thought so—first they came in here tonight,” Kingsbury replied, pointing at the white man’s body sprawled half in the parlor, half in the narrow hallway. “They was on the crew what took Mathilda to their boat last summer.”
“I cain’t be sure as you, Hames,” Reuben said as they stood huddled together, their eyes moving over the scene of blood and death, tattered furniture and broken clayware. “You two was what seen ’em in the Kangaroo afore Ebenezer took off on his own to break Mathilda loose.”
“I’m sure of it,” Kingsbury answered quietly, stonily. “They come in here tonight, looking us over—I got more sure of it. Can only be the two Ebenezer said jumped the boat afore he kill’t them other two.”
“All that over a whore,” Root moaned, wagging his head as he kept the knife held on the big slave. “And now this—with some more goddamned whores.”
“There’ll be others comin’ soon,” Ovatt warned.
“You best take me to the boat,” Kingsbury said as Root dragged Titus to his feet.
Ovatt asked, “You hurt bad?”
“Dunno,” and Hames swallowed down some pain that grayed his face even more. “Just get me there now!”
“What we gonna do with these whores?” Root asked.
“Take ’em up back there in them cribs. Have ’em tie each other up and gag ’em,” Kingsbury snapped, his eyes clenched fiercely. “Just do it quick—dunno how long I can stay on my feet like this.”
Bass and Ovatt did just that. While the pilot and Reuben held a pair of Annie Christmas’s big horse pistols on the whimpering prostitutes and that big, bald-headed bartender, Titus and Heman tore dressing gowns and petticoats into strips they forced the whores into tying around ankles and wrists, as well as knotting a tight gag around each mouth.
“Get outta here ’fore I shoot you!” Kingsbury snarled.
Bass poked his head out of a crib to find two men standing at the door flap. Their eyes flew around the parlor’s clutter, then back to that pair of wide muzzles Kingsbury and Root held pointed at them—before the pair turned and fled like frightened quail, bellowing like gored hogs.
“The fat’s in the fire now,” Root grumbled as the other two emerged from the cribs.
“Don’t worry ’bout gagging her now,” Kingsbury said, pointing his pistol at Annie Christmas, who, for the last few minutes, had been unleashing her wrath on her slave-bartender. “Just get that son of a bitch tied—every last damned body Under-the-Hill gonna be crawling over here in a shake of a bear’s tail. We gotta get when he’s tied down.”
“Where?”
Kingsbury glared at Ovatt. “You idjit! Back to our goddamned boat!”
“With them sonsabitches atween us and the boat—all of ’em coming this way to see what the ruckus is?” Root asked in a high pitch.
Titus didn’t know how the idea ignited in his mind of a sudden, but it was there—with a certainty that startled him. Something so sure and surprising, it damn near frightened him.
“We can make it back through the woods,” Titus suggested in a whisper so none of the whores would hear. When Annie Christmas stopped cursing the barman, Bass was frightened. Root held up one of the pistols, and the
