Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (28 page)

“
I am Spartacus!” With
that, Kip charged him, a five-pronged pitchfork aimed at the big
man’s groin. Cimarron pivoted to one side, reducing the target to
his flank. The blades glanced his leg, and then in one smooth
motion, Cimarron grabbed the pitchfork just where the wooden pole
met the steel fork. He did have a lot of quick.

With a flick of the wrist, he lifted boy and
pitchfork, Kip hanging on, as if practicing his pole vault.
Cimarron shook the pitchfork and Kip tumbled to the floor.

“
Next time,” I said to my
nephew, “don’t yell first.”

“
No need for this,”
Cimarron said, cocking his arm, and sailing the pitchfork over my
head. I ducked anyway, and it landed with a thud in the far wall,
where it sunk in and vibrated like a tuning fork.

“
Now, boy, you git out of
here,” he said to Kip, who hesitated.

“
I’ll be all right,” I
lied, and Kip headed for the open barn door, looking back at me
with sadness and fear.

“
Now, you,” Cimarron said.
“Let’s finish this.”

We stood maybe fifteen feet apart, facing
each other. “I’ve never touched a woman against her will in my
life,” I said. “She’s lying to you. I don’t know why. I don’t know
who killed Hornback, or what happened to Blinky, or why Jo Jo came
up here, or even why I followed her, but I know I didn’t touch
her.”

Cimarron brought his right hand up behind
his ear and snapped his wrist forward. The bullwhip flicked toward
me unseen, and cracked, the tip catching me on the shoulder. I
thought I’d been stabbed. I backed up, trying to get out of range,
and Cimarron advanced, lashing the whip at me, coming up short. He
lowered his arm, flicked his wrist, and this time, the tip caught
me on the thigh, sending a stinging pain down my leg.

He had cut off my path to the open door, and
now I hobbled toward a window, but this was one he had boarded up
after the hailstorm. Two steel support posts supported the loft
here, and I squeezed between them to block the oncoming whip.
Cimarron still tried, though, snapping the leather against the
steel posts with the sound of ricocheting gunshots.

After three or four tries, he dropped the
whip and just came after me. I backed farther along the wall,
studded with dowels hung with bridles, reins, and blinders. Still
facing Cimarron, I moved backward, my hand feeling along the wall,
until my fingers wrapped round the cold metal of a bit and
bridle.

He was on me then, reaching for me with open
palm, trying to grab me around the neck. As he did, I swung the
bridle, and the bit cracked his front teeth and sunk between his
jaws. I kept pushing and he gagged, his tongue stuck under the bit.
I had his head bent back, and still I pushed, cutting the sides of
his mouth, his tongue and gums, forcing his mouth open, farther
still.

Then he bit down.

He clamped the metal bit between his jaws
and stopped my movement. Both my hands were on the bridle, and both
his hands were free. He boxed my ears with a thunderous double
punch. I sank to my knees, my head ringing, and he kicked me in the
solar plexus. I pitched forward, heaving, and he grabbed my hair
and knocked me over backward. I stumbled back two steps, tripped
over a two-by-four railing and tumbled into a corncrib. I was on
all fours, gagging, staving off the urge to vomit, trying to catch
my breath.

Cimarron stood watching me, his eyes blazing
with hate. His tongue flicked the corners of his mouth, where blood
trickled down his chin. I tried to get to my feet, but the corncobs
rolled under my feet and I fell. When I looked up, Cimarron was
pointing something at me. At first, I thought it was a gun.

I blinked twice.

“
Don’t move, lawyer, or
I’ll nail you to the barn wall. I’ll crucify you, and no court in
the land would convict me. Even the Lord would
understand.”

I was trying to get up again.

“
I mean it,
lawyer.”

“
Jo Jo,” I called out.
“Where are you? Tell him the truth. Tell him how you got me out
here. Tell him that you told me he beat and raped you.”

I heard the floorboards creaking overhead
and caught sight of her coming down the ladder. In a moment she was
beside Cimarron, clutching the blanket at her throat, looking small
and vulnerable. “He raped me, Simmy, and then attacked you. And
you’re right, no one would blame you. You’ll never even be charged.
I know. It’s what I do for a living. You were protecting a loved
one and defending yourself. It’s justifiable homicide.”

“
She’s lying,” I said, my
voice weak and unconvincing. “She’s lying about
everything.”

I was half crouching, half standing, like
some prehistoric ape-man, ancestor to us all. He aimed the stud gun
at my chest, then carefully lowered it toward my groin, then
lowered it an inch more.

“
You’re bluffing,” I said.
“It won’t fire that way. The barrel has to press against the target
...”

Whomp
. A carbon steel nail ricocheted off an ear of corn beneath
my feet.

“
...unless you modified
it,” I said.

Cimarron slipped another nail into the
barrel, raised the gun, aimed at the center of my forehead, then
turned his wrist a fraction of an inch.

I felt the whistle of the
nail by my ear and heard it
whomp
into the wall. Again, he slipped a nail into the
barrel.
Whomp
,
into a cross-hatched beam just above my head.

When I looked back at him, he was aiming at
my midsection. Click.

“
Damn. Josefina, there’s a
full clip over by the sawhorse.”

Cimarron stood ten feet away. I could launch
myself out of the corncrib, lower a shoulder and send him flying. I
could fake and juke and zig and zag and get the hell out of there.
Sure, and I could fly to the moon, but at the moment, I couldn’t
lift one leg. Exhaustion and fear had paralyzed me.

I saw Jo Jo hand Cimarron something, heard
the sound of metal sliding against metal. He was pointing the stud
gun at me again. “A fellow could grow tired pulling this trigger
all day. Gives you respect for roofers and carpenters. I’ve got
some pretty strong wrists, and already I’m getting tuckered out.
Maybe I should just end the game.”

He aimed at my heart, lowered to my groin,
moved down to my knee, then back to the heart. “Bang,” he said,
then laughed as I winced.

He quickly moved the gun to a point high
over my head.

Whomp
. Another nail into the barrel.
Whomp
. Again, a high shot. Just what
the hell was he doing?

I heard a tearing sound and looked up in
time to be hit in the face with a dozen ears of field corn, kernels
hard as pebbles, cobs heavy as nightsticks. And then another dozen,
and then a deluge. Down they poured through a mesh screen at the
bottom of the silo torn open by the nails.

I tried to scoot on hands and knees, but I
slipped again, and the com continued to fall. I raised my arms
above my head, but I was knocked off-balance and buried, facedown,
as still it poured over me.

Air.

I couldn’t breathe.

I tried to inhale, but the weight of an
elephant pressed down on my back. I wriggled to one side and took
in a breath.

Dust.

I coughed and sputtered and struggled to
gulp in air.

From somewhere I heard his muffled voice.
“Lawyer eats all my corn, the animals will starve this winter.”

I squirmed some more, managed to take one
breath, then was conscious of movement. Mine. I was being pulled
backward by my ankles. Then I was hoisted up and over the crib
railing and tossed to the floor. I was flat on my back, and in a
moment, Cimarron was on top of me, sitting on my chest pinning my
arms down at the wrists. He didn’t weigh any more than the
Appaloosa. Then he released one of my wrists and slapped my face
with an open palm, and then the back of his hand, his huge knuckles
hitting me hard across the bridge of my nose.

He dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out
a handful of nails, placing them in his mouth. He loaded one into
the gun, reached around my head and pulled at the top of my
sweatshirt. I felt the cold metal of the gun barrel against my
neck.

Whomp
. A nail tore through my sweatshirt and into the
floor.

“
Maybe the lawyer needs a
haircut.” He loaded a nail, placed the barrel at the top of my
skull, then slid it over the skull.
Whomp
. A nail skimmed my head and
sunk into the floor, giving me a new part in my hair. He slid off
me and placed the gun just below my crotch. Another nail in the
barrel, another shot into the floor, close enough to make various
parts of me retreat northward.

The rest was a blur. A nail that just missed
my kneecap, another alongside my foot. One alongside each temple,
the noise deafening. Finally, a last shot between my splayed
fingers. Then he dropped the gun into the straw.

“
Josefina,” he called out.
“I’m gittin’ tired of this. The fireplace is lit in the house. Take
one of those branding irons in there and heat it up good. I’m going
to show this fellow what we do with rapists out here.”

Her voice was a whisper. “Simmy, why not
just finish it?”

He was sitting on my chest again, and I felt
him turn to face her.

“
I don’t know about
that.”

I stretched my right arm out as far as it
would go. Beneath my hand, I felt something metallic.

“
I want him to suffer for
what he did to you, but I’m not going to kill him. Scar him, maim
him, put the fear into him so he never bothers you again, but I’ve
never killed a man, and I won’t start now.”

“
If he lives and starts
talking, it’ll just complicate things,” she said. “Keep it clean
and simple.”

My hand had worked itself around the
metallic piece, which was hot to the touch. I hadn’t used one since
Hurricane Betsy lifted the shingles and tar paper off Granny’s roof
with 140-mile-per-hour winds when I was still a kid. I was going to
use it now. I didn’t know if the clip had a bullet left or if there
was a nail in the barrel, but I had very little to lose in finding
out.

I made a show of moving my left hand, just
to distract Cimarron. He saw the movement and used his right hand
to pin down my left. Then he smacked me in the face again with his
free hand. In that instant, I came up with the stud gun.

Heavy sucker.

It took me a long second to get it pointed
at his chest.

Too long.

His hand grabbed it underneath and swung it
up. It was just passing his forehead when I squeezed the trigger.
At the same moment, his left fist smashed straight into my chin. I
wanted so to hear the thunk of carbon steel into flesh and bone,
but all I heard was a metallic click followed by the crash of surf
against rocks and the volcanic roar of exploding pain.

My last conscious thoughts were merely a
series of sounds.

The sounds were far away and dreamlike,
echoing against the dented tinplate of my skull. The world was
spinning on a wobbly axis. Everything seemed so slow, except the
hot ice pick of agony that flashed from jaw to brain.

Did I really hear anything
through the fog? Yes, there it was: a thud, a grunt, a
muffled
whomp
, and
as I slipped into the cool quiet darkness, a hazy image of Blinky
Baroso floated high above me, laughing, calling me something, a
lousy judge of character. Finally, his voice faded, and I was swept
away by a feeling of ultimate and unyielding dread.

CHAPTER 20

DO, RE, MI

Jail food is to food as military music is to
music.

Hard biscuits and fatty bacon and greasy
meats. Maybe

the idea was to induce cardiac arrest and
save taxpayers money. The jailer was a potbellied, slack-jawed man
of sixty who looked as if he’d been eating the jail hash for thirty
years. He was a football fan, and when I told him I had chased the
oblong spheroid for a living, he treated me with kindness and
respect and brought me pizza and beer. Then I made the mistake of
telling him I was now a lawyer. He shook his head sadly, spat on
the floor, and said no wonder I ended up here.

Or was I a lawyer?

The Florida Bar had begun disbarment
proceedings.

Judge T. Bone Coleridge had ordered me to
show cause why Kip shouldn’t be transferred to the custody of the
state H.R.S., and when I didn’t appear in court (having been
unavoidably detained, as they say, in Colorado), he adjudged me in
contempt of court. Actually, contempt was too mild a word for how I
felt about the courts.

I was under indictment in Miami for
first-degree murder of Kyle Hornback, local securities dealer.
Yeah, that’s what the paper called him. It sounded better than con
man, flimflam artist, swindler, extortionist, or racketeer. In
death, we are all judged more kindly. The crueler the death, the
kinder the obit.

I was under indictment in Aspen for
second-degree murder in the brutal slaying of Kit Carson Cimarron,
ranch owner and civic activist, according to the local weekly.

Civic activist? I suppose they’d call Bonnie
and Clyde interstate bankers.

Completing the list of my
legal troubles, I was also being dunned by a record club for three
CDs I had never ordered. I wrote a couple of letters telling them
what they could do with
The Best of Jim
Nabors
, but their computer kept
threatening my credit rating, heaven forbid.