Authors: Jack Ketchum
The naked woman in the main room was
still swaying from her chains as they passed. Three men were gambling,
throwing dice beneath her. Another was snorting
something
white—coke or speed or heroin.
At the door Harpe stopped her.
“You want to know,” he said. “Little’s
full of shit. He shot those people and he was all by himself when he did it. My
brother always was an asshole. You tell him for me that if and when you get him
off he better slit his own fucking throat because I’m coming after him and what
I do to him will be a whole lot worse.” She nodded and turned and walked into
the half light of the coming dawn.
* * *
Micah
Harpe closed the door behind her and thought that you never did know what the
day was going to bring. When he was a young man he ’d quietly slit some
lawyer’s throat in his very own office because of a padded bill for services
rendered on a chickenshit DU I rap and here he was letting another lawyer go—and
this one was defending his idiot little brother. Forgetting the generally
damaged condition of her, a damn good- looking lawyer too. Under other
circumstances he’d have poked her all night long into the morning. Life was
full of surprises.
He
walked over to the bar and Edwin the bartender— not Eddy, never, the man was
one vain sonovabitch— looked up at him and smiled.
“You
guys downstairs missed the good part, ” he said. “Oh yeah? What part was that?”
“Guy
got up and walked right out of here. See that trail of blood over there? Guy
went for a little stroll. ”
* * *
She walked slowly, half-dazed in the
clean open air and head pounding and reflected with grim humor that her head
had taken a whole hell of a lot of abuse for a single
night. The dog skeleton on the swing
swayed on a breeze that wasn’t there and with so little light she saw too late
in her approach the bloody hand that moved the chain and saw him slide around
from behind the tree, Billy grinning and covered with so much blood that it
could only be craziness keeping him alive and standing. The hand that darted
out at her and closed over her wrist was cold and slimy red. All of him was
red. Only the knife blade in his other hand glinted clean at his side.
“
You
swayed your charms with him, didn’t you
?” he said. “You did.”'
Blood bubbled over his lips and slid over
his chin and she tried to jerk free so that he staggered toward her but somehow
kept his stance and pulled her toward him with improbable, impossible strength
and then he raised the knife.
And then screamed.
Harpe’s hands were over his wrist. She
heard it snap like a dry twig in the forest and the knife fell to his feet.
Billy clutched at the wrist, wailing, Billy suddenly gone boy soprano as Harpe
lifted him off his feet bear- hugging him chest-to-chest and walked him from
the swing and grinning remains of dog or wolf and then lifted him high to the
first of the nooses hanging beyond and slipped his head through and then
dropped him like a log.
The snap of neck was louder than the snap
of wrist had been. She could hear bone grind bone inside him. His legs jerked
and spasmed and then he was quiet, swaying, drooling pulsing waves of blood and
pissing the length of his jeans.
Harpe turned to her and smiled.
“Hole-in-the-Wall,” he said. “A little frontier justice.”
* * *
She was nearly to the turnoff to the main
road when she saw the headlights coming toward her—on a night filled with
blazing headlights searing into her, two more now, like lasers burning through
the most awful headache of her life and she fell dizzy to her knees before
them.
Too
much
, she thought,
too damn much
and then she heard car
doors slam and feet pound the dirt and then he was calling her name.
* * *
So that’s it,” Alan said. The Turtle
Brook was busy with the lunch crowd for a change. He wiped some burger juice
off his chin and wondered why they had to make these things so thick no normal
mouth could close over them.
“Thanks to you and your late friend
Marion they finally got to close the place down. Harrison gets indicted on
four counts of murder for the kid, who turns out to he your basic runaway by
the way and for Marion, Short and Rothert, with Thaw and Coombs as
co-conspirators since they run the place. Thaw and Coombs? They may very well
beat the rap or take a plea. Hole-in-the-Wall’s a big place to supervise and
you can’t be everywhere at once. You know, that kind of thing. The Church of
Final Judgment keeps no records and it looks like takes no prisoners and
nobody thinks Harrison will do a whole lot of talking, so that’s probably
all
they’ll get. Too bad it took a day
to get that goddamn search warrant.”
“Why
couldn’t
you get the warrant?” she said. “I thought you and Judge Lardner were thick as
thieves.” You should only know, he thought.
He
hadn’t called
her
in months
, that was why.
It pissed her off. Simple as that. She wouldn’t even talk to him. And he
couldn’t do much begging with Frommer standing by. He shrugged and bit into his
burger.
“So there’s nothing at all on Micah
Harpe.” “Nothing,” he said. “Vanished.”
“Good,” she said and smiled.
She looked terrific in the turban, he
thought. Hell, she’d even looked terrific in the bandages last night. The
bandages and nothing else. Stark white against tanned smooth skin. She was
quite a goddamn woman to have gone through all of that and come out of it the
way she did. He was going to have to marry her soon before somebody else beat
him there. If he didn’t know that before, he sure did now.
“Good? Why’s that?” he said.
Her smile broadened. “Don’t worry. You’ll
see.”
* * *
Arthur “Little” Harpe sat on a bench in
the hall flanked by guards on either side. He got up when he saw Janet and her
new co-council Linda Morrison striding in his direction and smiled that shaky,
snaky
little smile of his that she used
to wish she could dissuade him from using in the courtroom.
“Hi, Janet,” he said. “Feeling better
today?”
“Much better, thank you.”
“What was the problem? I mean, if you
don’t mind my asking. All’s they told me was you weren’t so hot.” “Nothing to
worry about, Arthur.”
He didn’t need to know about the
nightmares. God, no. Certainly not Arthur Harpe. He didn’t need to know about
that poor little girl twisting in a sudden gale of gunfire.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re going to see
if we can’t get you out of here today.”
The smile this time was absolutely
genuine. The little worm probably had never hoped for such luck. The fact that
it
wasn’t
luck—-that she’d be lying
when she got up there on the witness stand and told the jury that Micah Harpe
had confessed to the Willis murders to her back in Hole-in-the-Wall—that was
something he didn’t need to know either.
Linda opened the door to the courtroom
for them and they stepped on through.
“By the way,” she said, “I have a message
for you. From your brother.”
The look of alarm on his face nearly made
her smile. But it wouldn’t do to smile. Instead she put her hand on his
shoulder and turned him toward the defense table. “But that can wait for now,”
she said, “can’t it?”