Part 45 (1/2)
Muire, you really ought to know well enough to stay the Hel out of other people's marriages by now.
I knocked anyway.
The knees of Liz Brady's calico dress were dirty and she held a scrub brush in her right hand: she had been waxing the kitchen floor. The dress was too hot for the weather, though, and though she'd splashed her face at the kitchen pump when she heard my knock, she could not hide the redness of her eyes. She moved stiffly, as if her bones ached.
”Hi, Missus Brady. May I come in for a minute?” My voice and face were as open and honest as I could make them. She hesitated, glanced over her shoulder. I stepped forward.
”I don't know, Miss MacAydan. I'm awful busy...”
I lowered my voice. ”Liz, let me in. Your husband's gone to town. It will be safe for a moment.”
My candor shocked her, and she stepped back the quarter-inch necessary for me to bustle past. She trailed me into her own kitchen forlorn as a shadow, and I looked from her to the half-waxed floor and found myself thinking about the oddity in the way she moved. Then I sat myself firmly down at the kitchen table while she hovered over me, wringing her hands on the handle of her brush. ”Miss MacAydan...”
”Liz, call me Maura,” I interrupted. ”And listen. You have to get out of this house, and do it now, before he kills you.”
”He'd never hurt me,” she began, and then she dropped the brush in terror as I surged across the floor toward her and caught her wrists in both hands. She screamed-in agony, not in fear-tears starring her eyes. She glanced down then, the pain in her face replaced by awe and then terror as I stripped the long sleeves back from her arms with casual, inhuman strength and a horrid rending of cloth.
Black, cracked scabs encircled her wrists almost completely, thicker and worse by the k.n.o.bs of the slender, birdlike bones. The marks were laid over other, older scars, and I had seen enough prisoners in my long life to recognize the like.
She was not much bigger than I, and infinitely less strong. I thought of Brady's bulldog shoulders, and felt the blinding white current of my rage rise up in me.
”Not Stagolee,” I told her. ”I'm not worried about Stagolee hurting you. Brady, Liz. And Browning too.”
A short ride and a pot of tea later, I got her settled at the Ivory Dog. Then I got back on my red mare, rode home, and got the crowbar from the tool room in the little barn. I paced up and down the length of my house, swinging that short length of iron in my hand. The sun was moving faster than I wanted it to, and I had no way to control too many of the players in this little game.
I kicked the wall, cursed hard when an oil lamp tumbled and broke against the raw pine wallboards. Then I hefted the wrecking bar in my hands and started ripping up the parlor floor.
The sun ached on my head, despite the welcome shade of my hat. Liz lay hiding in the cool back room where Duncan kept his bed, three floors below, bandages seemingly all over her body. Duncan was with her, and the Dog was shuttered and closed, just like the rest of Main Street.
I lay on my belly on the roof, a carbine and my revolver by my side, and waited for the short shadows to appear on the street below. Sweat p.r.i.c.kled out across my neck; lank strands of hair clung to my forehead. A familiar-unfamiliar weight rested between my shoulderblades-the sheath of a sword I had not touched in years. I stole a pull from my water bottle without raising my head, tasted leather and warm spit.
A horse stamped in the corral down the street, followed by the jingle of chains. The reek of my own sweat, oil and powder, horse manure, the midden out back of the Dog clogged my nose. A hawk called, far off, answered by another. Lovers or enemies: no way to tell from the sound of their cries. The tar on the roof under my hands was melting. I thought of the texture of things with no place on this world, in this time. Sealing wax, ski resin, rosin for a fiddle's bow.
No, rosin belongs here.
Stagolee stepped into the street first, and my thumb moved with practiced strength on the safety of the carbine. He glanced around, but from where he stood he never could have seen something that was not a breeze ruffle the white eyelet curtains in the half-open window of the upstairs bedroom of Miss Pamela's boarding house, across the street. I did, however, and I saw as well the gleam of steel and a flash of ash-colored hair.
My carbine roared and choked simultaneously with the tigerlike cough of the rifle. The gun slammed into my shoulder, and a pane of gla.s.s starred and shattered. In the street, I heard Stagolee grunt and then curse.
Another gunshot rang out of the first floor of the Ivory Dog. I was already moving when the shotgun roared its answer.
I abandoned the carbine on the roof: it would only have impeded me. Perhaps the leap was superhuman: had I not been what I am, I would not have cared to try it. As it was, the three-story drop to the ground was jarring, but my knees took most of the shock of landing. Crouched, I rolled with the landing, letting gravity take me to one side with a wind-breaking thud. I needed to keep moving, suspecting that I hadn't done more than wing Browning. The sword across my back bruised my spine.
Blood lay like a banner in the street, but no body. I gasped painfully as I dragged myself to my feet, pulling my sword over my shoulder and into my right hand.
She flared suddenly at my touch, singing with a lost and abandoned Light that might have brought tears to my eyes another day. I had more immediate concerns. Raising the sword-bearing arm to protect my face from the shards of broken gla.s.s, I threw myself in through the tavern window.
The big window at the front of the Dog had been broken before, but usually as a result of the forceful expulsion of a brawler. It exploded inward quite satisfactorily, and I caught Marlowe Brady with most of my meager weight across the back of his neck. The eight-shooter skated out of his hand and across Duncan's polished pine floor, fetching up against the base of the upright piano with a musical thump, which was echoed by the sound of the pommel of my blazing sword striking the back of Brady's head and Brady's forehead striking the floor. He fell quiet, and I rolled off him and around behind the bar.
The bullet had gone through Miles Duncan and broken the looking gla.s.s. The blood had already slowed to a trickle, still pulsing weakly from the ragged wound in his side. I knelt in the puddles and spatters of it, remembering other pools of red, another time. As I reached for him he shook his head and might have coughed, but he had no air in his lungs to do it with. His maimed right hand lay inches from where the shotgun had fallen after discharging its useless burden into the bar-room ceiling. It made an interesting tattoo, and would make a better story, one day.
”Miles...”
”Doesn't hurt,” he mouthed, and then paused as if to gather breath and strength. He braved a painful smile. ”Miss Maura...”
”My fault, Miles...”
”No blame... Miss...”
I shook my head. ”My name is Muire, Miles. Long story.”
His hand clutched mine weakly. ”Always knew... on the lam...” His face contorted as he struggled to breathe. ”Last request, Muire?”
”Name it.” My words had the force of a vow.
”Bar goes to Liz...” I nodded, and he shook his head to say he wasn't finished. ”And Susie. You take my fiddle.”
”A treasure.” I squeezed his hand, not caring now if he knew my strength, and let the Light come into my eyes-perhaps to comfort him. His eyes widened, though whether he saw me or Death I will never know. ”Scared.” A long pause. ”See you in Hel...”
”You're going to Halla, Miles.” I felt myself smile. ”I know it for a fact.”
”Never was a... churchgoing man...”
”Churchgoing's got nothing to do with it. They'll take you in or they'll have me to answer to.”
Surely I was not lying. Surely, though the Light has failed, souls like his are not lost forever? Surely, somewhere, I have some authority still.
He drew it in, what I knew would be his final breath, and expelled it with a silent tumble of words. I heard them anyway. ” ...angel? On the lam?”
There was blood on my hands as I closed his eyes, blood on my hands as I picked up his shotgun and stood, just in time to hear the click behind me of a hammer being pulled back. I tensed, and heard that soft, sharp voice cut through the smoke of death and gunpowder. ”Don't worry, Miss MacAydan. I know whose side you're on now.”
I turned around slowly. Stagolee stood over Marlowe Brady, on booted foot on the unconscious man's back, a revolver in his right hand. He looked directly at me and smiled a crooked smile, showing three missing teeth on the ruined side of his face. Then he glanced back down at Brady and shot him once, fastidiously, in the back of the head.
My shock must have shown, because he grinned at me again and stepped around the sudden runnel of blood and brains that dribbled across the floor to mingle with Duncan's. Stagolee's left arm hung stupidly useless, and his own blood dripped from the fingers of that hand. ”Browning,” I said to him, and he nodded.
”Missed him,” he answered. ”Son of a wh.o.r.e.”
”Browning killed her. Liz's mom, I mean.”
Stagolee pulled Duncan's ap.r.o.n from a hook behind the bar, laid his gun on the counter, and began to improvise a sling. After half a useless, one-handed minute, he looked at me with something that might have been pleading in another man. ”What do you say, Doc?”
I bound his arm up while he remained silent, pouring himself a shot into an unbloodied wooden bowl and downing it with his other hand. Then he turned his head and spat, while I stared at him expectantly.
”Yeah, I guess he did.” He looked at me straight, then, as I tested my knots. I felt his brutality in that sea-blue gaze, and I remembered how he had smiled as he killed the helpless sheriff. ”And another thing.”
I nodded. I already knew. ”She's your little girl, isn't she? Liz.” I felt desolation in the look he shot me like ice in my heart.
”She is not to know,” he answered, pouring himself another drink. ”Her momma deserved better men, and so does she.”
I took the little bowl out of his hand and downed the whiskey myself. ”She knows. She figured it all out herself.”