hour.
You had to give the bastard credit, Deke Burgade thought. He’d damned near made it. And you also had to thank him. There weren’t all that many pleasures to be had on Skeleton Key. But Ross McGinnis had given Burgade one of the few to be had. The stupid bastard had tried to escape.
Burgade was one of those tall, slender men who was stoop-shouldered, skinny-armed, and even a bit limpwristed. His pale face was bland of feature and wrinkled of skin. The only thing distinctive about him was the pirate-like patch over his right blue eye. That gave him not only a sense of menace but an entree—at least he thought it did—into the very special club of hard-ass hombres. What Burgade might lack in strength and cunning, he more than made up for in meanness. Everything he did was calculated to prove to himself, his victim, and any onlookers that he was a real man.
Take the way he’d tied Ross McGinnis to the hawthorn tree. He took strips of leather, twisted them tight around the man’s wrists, and then poured canteen water on the strips. So that any time McGinnis so much as moved under the lashing whip, he’d force the thorns to eat deeper and deeper into his flesh.
Burgade of the eye patch was no pansy torturer. He was a creative sadist who truly enjoyed his work.
He was also a tireless one.
As the blue jays and the brown thrashers and the painted buntings and the phoebes—songbirds all—began their dawn chorus, Burgade was still at it. He’d been at it since just before four a.m., approximately two hours ago.
Sometimes, he even forgot what he was doing, got so lost in his own thoughts—he had a little gal in Little Rock he got to see twice a month and he was planning his next surprise visit to see her—so it was as if his whip hand was an automatic device.
McGinnis had quit screaming a long time ago, which meant he was probably unconscious. Burgade hated the ones who sissied out and slumped into unconsciousness right away. He’d had a few who swore at him and mocked him for long stretches of time, pretending that the lashes meant nothing. They called him filthy names, they joked about his eye patch, they told him what they were going to do to him when they figured out a way to get free.
And Burgade loved it. He loved a challenge. Damned right he did. Nothing was more fun than turning these boastful prisoners into sobbing, half-insane pieces of ripped flesh and broken spirit. Oh, how they’d plead, all pride fled. But it didn’t do them any good. Burgade of the eye patch had that tireless whip hand and it seemed to grow only more tireless when it was working over the ones who sassed him and made fun of him.
He stopped whipping McGinnis. The man had long ago stopped feeling anything. Coward. Chicken shit bastard. Fainting like that so he could escape the lash. Burgade was sure that he himself could stand up to any kind of whipping anybody could give him.
He went up to McGinnis and looked him over. He always stripped them before whipping them. He lashed every part of their body’s back side. From the ankles right up to the crown of the head.
McGinnis was a mess of wounds that were like the mouths of tiny dying children crying out for mercy and help. This bastard wouldn’t start feeling good again for a couple of months. And the others, seeing him, sure wouldn’t try to escape.
He used the pliers on the wrists, twisting the leather strips free. The tree’s thorns had been hungry. Long strings of flesh and blood hung from the tree. On the left wrist you could see bone.
He reached down and dragged McGinnis through a patch of wildflowers, yellow jasmines, orchids, and wild verbenas. The island was not without its beauty.
He dragged McGinnis all the way down to the river and then hauled him face first into the water. If McGinnis died, Burgade would just push the corpse out into the deeper water and let it sink.
If McGinnis was alive, he’d come awake soon enough.
Burgade went back, sat his bony ass on a small boulder, and watched as McGinnis hung there between life and death for a long, long moment.
The first impression McGinnis gave was that he preferred life. He sputtered and splashed as he tried to raise his head. He even managed to speak a few words. Not that Burgade could understand them.
And then he died.
Or sure gave that impression, anyway.
Just buoyed flat on the surface of the water, unmoving.
Burgade walked to the river and started to wade the corpse into the deeper water. Wanting to be sure that McGinnis really was a corpse, Burgade seized his head, turned him over until he was face up. And then took his hunting knife and cut McGinnis’s throat.
A cautious man, Burgade cut the throat a second time, this time using the hunting knife in the opposite direction.
Red blood tainted the blue, blue water.
Burgade went back to the camp and fixed himself some breakfast.
16
Smell of river. Scorch of sunlight. Stab of back pain.
Fargo woke, disoriented.
A stretch of flawless blue sky above him. A snoring Aaron Tillman lying about two feet away from him.
Then he remembered everything.
He lay on the deck of a large, yacht-like boat. They’d been transferred from the wagon some time ago. From what he could see, this was quite a vessel, what they called a well-smack schooner that had been custom-fitted with a mainsail and a smaller sail called a mizzen. There were four oars, two on each side. And a large cabin in the center of the boat. The cabin door faced the port side.
He raised himself slowly and with great pain. A wide stretch of river. And in the sun-splashed, hazy distance he could see land rising abruptly from the water.
He realized he was seeing the infamous island for the first time. The closer they got, the more lush and inviting the island looked. You wouldn’t expect that hell could look so good. But Fargo suspected that despite its rugged, natural appeal, the island held secrets dark enough to scare just about anybody.
He allowed himself one of his rare moments of doubt. His plan had been to get on the island and destroy whatever Noah Tillman had set up there. But what if he became just one more of Noah’s prisoners, one who couldn’t do anything more than submit to whatever Noah demanded. Sometimes, he drew courage from all the tales people told of him. Living up to the legend of the Trailsman inspired him as it inspired others. But he wasn’t invincible.
Had he put himself in the middle of a trap from which there was no escape?
Ekert appeared just before the boat reached land. Un-shaved, he looked grizzled and tired. He toted a six-gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Even given the pitch of the craft in the choppy water, he staggered more than was necessary.
He went straight to Aaron Tillman, stood over the shackled man sprawled on the deck.
“Morning, Mr. Tillman.”
“You sonofabitch. You’ve been waiting a long time for this, haven’t you?” Aaron snapped.
“You notice I called you ‘Mr. Tillman,’ Mr. Tillman?” Ekert smiled, tilted the bottle up, took a long swig that made his Adam’s apple bobble. “You know what your brother was nice enough to let me do?”
Aaron just glared at him.
“He said I could do anything to you I wanted. Anything at all.”
The pointed-toe kick of the cowboy boot did maximum damage, caught a rib and cracked it. Aaron screamed and began to twist back and forth in great and immediate pain.
“All the times I had to clean up your puke; all the times I had to haul you out of saloons before somebody killed you because you were such a prick when you were drunk; all the times I had to put you on my shoulder and carry you out of whorehouses because you’d passed out—and you never said thanks. Not even once, Mr. Tillman.
