Part 83 (1/2)

”So I am,” Ringo answered.

There was a thump, and something inhuman made a strangled noise of pain. Doc didn't flinch, but Miss Lil cringed.

”You learn those smarts in dentist school?” Ringo called.

”Come by 'em honestly,” Doc said.

Flora jerked a thumb down a side pa.s.sage and raised her eyebrows to Miss Lil in a question.

Miss Lil glanced. Nodded. Smiled.

Flora's answering grin showed how crooked those front teeth really were.

Doc remembered Miss Lil's dead-on sense of direction. An unfamiliar sensation-a little bright hope-flickered in his chest, beside the dull old recognized burn of the disease that was killing him.

But Missus Jorgensen put up a hand. Not whispering, just talking so low it wouldn't carry, she said, ”John Ringo doesn't die here.”

”c.r.a.p,” Flora hissed. She glanced around. ”All right. No killing shots.”

”When does he die?” The demand was out of Doc's mouth before he even realized he'd made it. In for a penny, he thought. ”And who kills him?”

Missus Jorgensen shook her head ”You know I can't tell you that.”

”Right,” Doc said. ”If you changed the past, you'd change the future. And then you might not even exist.”

She nodded. ”Doc-”

”Don't worry, ma'am,” he said. ”Whatever answer you gave, it wouldn't satisfy me.”

Doc slipped the coach gun into its sheath, slung it over his shoulders, and walked forward again, hands held high. He went alone-or nearly alone: Bill ghosted down the wall beside him, for support of morale and covering fire if nothing more. But Doc didn't look at him. Doc didn't do anything as he rounded the corner into John Ringo's sights, in fact, other than raise his hands up just a little tiny bit higher.

Ringo-a dark fellow with a moustache like a set of window drapes-stood against the far wall of a chamber as big as the one where they'd stabled the horses, holding the moon man around the neck. This room was in better repair, though-the walls and floor rusting, sure, but scrubbed and not heaped with debris. There was a sort of nest of fabric at one end, and transparent jugs full of what must be drinking water.

The moon man in Ringo's grasp was no taller than a boy of twelve, and just as skinny. Its long hands curved over Ringo's arm where his grasp forced its head up. Ringo pushed the muzzle of his pistol against the creature's head hard enough that even from across the room, Doc could see its slick gray flesh denting.

Poor critter, Doc thought. Marooned here like Robinson Crusoe. And we're the cannibal savages.

Ringo grinned over the moon man's head as Doc stopped twelve or fifteen feet away. ”I'm heeled now, Holliday.”

”I can see that.” Doc clicked candy against his tongue with his teeth, letting his hands drift wide. ”I said all I wanted out of you is ten paces in the street, John. This isn't a street. And that isn't a combatant.”

”But it's worth something, isn't it?” Ringo asked. ”There's gotta be a bounty. That's why you all are out here.”

Doc opened his mouth. He closed it again. For a change, he thought for a second.

”That's right,” Doc said. He edged a step or two closer to Ringo. A step or two farther from Bill, and the potential cover of the bend in the corridor. ”There's a bounty. Thirty thousand dollars. But only if we bring it in alive.”

He didn't hear the women coming down the side corridor. He had to a.s.sume they were there, though, and that their silence was for Ringo's benefit ... or detriment.

”Thirty ... thousand?” Ringo said it like he'd never heard of so much money. Doc appreciated the reverence; he might have said the same words the same way himself if their situations were reversed.

”Alive,” Doc said.

Ringo might not have noticed it, but his hand eased off a little on the pistol. The moon man's head came up straighter. It blinked at Doc with vast, sea-dark eyes.

He didn't dare look at it. He kept his attention on Ringo's face. ”I'll split it with you.”

”Where are the rest of 'em?” Ringo asked.

Doc shrugged. ”Thirty thousand seemed better than five thousand.”

Ringo snorted. But Doc knew that was the key to successful lying. People judged what other people would do by what they themselves would do. You could tell a h.e.l.l of a lot about a man by what he a.s.sumed others got up to. If you're looking for a thief, bet on the man who's always accusing his neighbors.

”So what's to stop me taking that whole thirty thousand myself?” Ringo slid the muzzle back from the moon man's head, turned it to face Doc. The barrel looked as big and black as barrels always do.

Now,Doc thought. Now! But there was no crack of gunfire from the side corridor, no blossom of blood from Ringo's skull. Doc forced his eyes to stay trained on Ringo. ”You don't know where to collect. Do you think there are wanted posters for that thing?”

”So you tell me where,” Ringo said. ”Or I shoot you and then I shoot it.”

He was just the sort to spoil a well so somebody else couldn't use it too. ”I can draw a map,” he said. And snorted. ”That is, a.s.suming you could read it.”

”Who's holding the shooting iron, Holliday?”

”Not much of a threat,” Doc said, ”when we both know you're going to use it no matter what I say.”

Ringo couldn't keep the grin from lifting the corners of his moustache, like h.e.l.l's curtain drawn back from an unholy proscenium arch. ”Maybe you better tell me where and from who to collect that bounty.”

”Maybe so,” Doc said. ”Maybe I'd rather chew a bu-”

The echoes of a single gun's report weren't any easier to bear in this chamber than they had been in the one where they had left the horses. Doc winced-how the h.e.l.l was that supposed to keep John Ringo alive until he met whatever unholy date with destiny these five had planned out for him-and then realized: Flora, walking forward now with Lil's smoking six-gun leveled, had shot the pistol out of Ringo's hand. Which was a h.e.l.l of a lot harder, Doc knew, than Eastern lady writers made it out to be in the dime novels.

”Now'd be a good time to run,” Flora said, her posse arrayed behind her, as Ringo stood there disbelieving, shaking his b.l.o.o.d.y, numb right hand.

He stood rooted on the spot, though, until the moon man turned its head and clamped that wide, lipless slash of a mouth closed on Ringo's arm.

They let him run. Miss Lil moved to the moon man, her hands outstretched, her voice soft. As she crouched down beside it, it didn't flinch.

”Victory?” Bill said to Missus Shutt.

”Victory,” she agreed.

John Henry Holliday looked down at the spatter of red blood on orange rust and shook his head. ”I'm d.a.m.ned tired.”

Flora and her partners left Holliday at the last fork in the road, their little gray guest bundled up in concealing clothes and riding crunched up on the brown mare behind Miss Lil. Before she'd left, Flora pulled Doc aside to pay him the second half of his money, and a little bonus, and to share a private word or two.

He'd been the one who'd spoken first, though. ”So. You really are from the future.”