The Time-Traveling Outlaw (15 page)

Then he saw it. At the corner of the barn, a board jutted slightly out from under the lip of the roof. Maybe he could grab onto the end of the plank, push himself away from the wall, and if the wood didn’t break, he could ride it down like a bending tree branch. 

No
, that was stupid, he thought. Wasn’t going to work. The barn wasn’t that old, but still, the wood would snap and he’d fall straight on his back, probably breaking it.

Did he really have another option, though? 

Logan cursed as he moved to the corner of the barn. He cursed fate, or whatever had brought him here. He cursed Sturgess. But mostly he cursed himself.

He reached out and grabbed the end of the loose board with both hands. It felt sturdy, which was good. He didn’t want it to snap off. But then, he didn’t want it to be too sturdy, either. 

He swung off the lip of the roof, holding on to the board, so that he was facing the edge of the barn, grasping on for his life. The board creaked and peeled backwards half a foot. He got a good look inside the barn. The hay was indeed on fire, orange flames licking the golden bails stacked along the far wall, turning them black and spreading like a wave. 

Maisy was bucking against the door of her stall, but it was no use. The door was latched tight. The smoke was billowing up now, filling the air.

Logan planted his boots against the wall of the barn and thought:
Here goes nothing
. 

He pushed. 

The board creaked again, then he saw two nails near the top pop out and fall to the ground. Then the board started to come away from the wall, and he was moving down and backwards, riding the board just like he’d planned.

He saw two more pairs of nails plink out of the board, and he was maybe five or six feet closer to the ground, and he thought:
It’s working. Holy shit, it’s really working.

Then there was a loud crack, like a sudden clap of thunder just before the rain, and he was falling. He tried to pivot, so that he wouldn't land on his back, and he managed to turn most of the way around before he hit the ground.

The hard dirt rushed up to hit him like a freight train, knocking the air out of him. He’d landed mostly face down, and he rolled over, pain wracking his whole body. He gasped for air. 

After a few seconds, when he could breathe again, he realized he hadn’t heard anything crack when he’d hit the ground. He hurt all over, but maybe, if he was lucky, nothing was broken. 

He looked up at the sky, framed by the edge of the barn. Gray smoke was drifting up everywhere, starting to black out the sky.

Maisy whinnied again, so loud this time it was almost a scream.

Logan rolled over onto all fours. He felt like someone had worked him over with an aluminum baseball bat. But no, he didn’t think anything was broken. He staggered to his feet and walked around to the door of the barn.

Smoke billowed out as he swung the door open. Luckily, Maisy’s stall was only ten feet in on the right. He covered his nose and mouth with one arm and plunged inside, smoke burning his eyes.

Maisy was raising up, knocking at the door of the stall with her front legs. Through the haze, Logan tried the catch, the wood slipping in his hands. He got it on the second try, swinging the stall door open. Maisy bolted out of the stall, hitting the door and knocking Logan to the floor. He couldn’t blame her, but goddamn, he’d just taken a pretty bad spill off the roof, and he didn’t really need to take another.

He lay on the floor of the barn, the air mercifully less smoky down here, and watched as Maisy ran to freedom through the open barn door.

He turned over on all fours, for the second time in only a few minutes, and started crawling toward the door. That seemed much more sensible than trying to stand back up. As he crawled, he felt the heat of the burning hay wafting over him in waves.

A few feet from the door, he stopped.

Oh no
, he thought.
The pocket watch
.

Sally had said she had put it in a lock box in the barn. Was it fireproof? Where was it? He briefly considered crawling back into the barn to look for it, but that was madness. Still, that watch was his only link to the future, his only way of getting back.

But none of that would matter if he was dead. So he looked just once over his shoulder back into the burning barn, the heat and smoke hitting his face and making him cough. Then he looked back to the open door and began to crawl again, feeling as if he was, for once and all, leaving his old life behind. His new life, the one here, was going to have to be whatever he could make of it, and right now it was a goddamn mess.

But at least he was alive. He crawled a good twenty feet clear of the barn, then collapsed. He rolled onto his back, coughing and breathing in the relatively clean air.

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at the barn, orange flames now licking the outside, plumes of black billowing from under the lip of the roof. 

People would come soon. If not for the fire, than for him. He had no doubt that once Winston had delivered Sally to his boss, he would inform the Sheriff that the fugitive was out at her ranch, possibly dead. Even before then, everybody in town and the surrounding farms was going to see the smoke from the fire. He didn’t know if they had some kind of fire department, volunteer or otherwise, but either way people would come.

He ached all over. His eyes and throat stung from the smoke. He felt like lying back on the dirt and falling asleep. But he couldn’t do that.

Logan struggled to his feet and looked around. Maisy was nowhere to be seen, but the horses of the two men he had shot still stood, saddled and ready, in front of the house. He staggered toward them. One was black, a white patch on its nose. The other was brown with a black mane.

He scavenged the bodies of the two dead men, taking both guns, belts, and ammunition. He buckled them across his waist, crisscrossing them as he had the ones from the other men he had killed. One of the men had worn a beaten, black cowboy hat. He picked it up from the dirt and put it on his head. 

The first time he tried to get on the horse, he slipped and fell hard to the ground. It would have been easy to just lie there, to wait for the men to come. To give up. 

But he thought of Sally, what they were going to do to her, and he pulled himself up, dragging his body from the ground. He nearly crawled into the saddle, swinging his leg over the horse with every ounce of effort he had left. 

He had to ride, not toward the road. That’s the way they’d be coming. But where? He closed his eyes and thought of the map Sally had drawn, beautifully detailed. He had stared at it while she had worked, and very nearly had the whole thing memorized, right down to the tiny trees and the curvy lines she had used to show the flow of water in Peach Creek. 

He saw it all, there in his mind’s eye, and as he mentally scanned the map, he realized where he needed to go. The nugget of a new plan began to form in his mind. 

Logan opened his eyes, turned the horse away from the road, and flicked the reins, nudging the horse forward with the heels of his boots. They took off across the field, kicking up a little cloud of red dust.

She woke up with a God-awful headache. She was sitting in a chair, and when she tried to move, she realized she was tied to it, bound with rope across her chest. Her hands were tied behind her back, and they’d even cinched her ankles to the chair legs.

Her blonde hair fell in her face, and she blew it to one side to get a good look at where she was. The room obviously belonged to a woman. A bed with pink satin sheets sat against the wall opposite her, red and pink pillows arranged across it. A long mirror stood against another wall, and a dresser with the remnants of makeup was across from it. 

She heard a noise through the wall, a man’s voice saying something, then the high trill of a woman’s laughter, obviously fake. She started to open her own mouth, only to realize for the first time that a strip of cloth had been tied over it. She screamed into it, only to hear her own muffled cry.

Abigail’s. That’s where she was. The whorehouse. 

God, her head hurt. The last thing she remembered was lying in the tub in her house, hearing the gunshots outside, then…

Winston. She remembered the scuffle, hitting him, then that nasty little knife at her throat. He’d knocked her out when they’d gotten to the road. Probably slung her over one of the horses and ridden with her here. She had no idea how long she’d been out. The room had no windows. It was probably in the interior of the house. She had no idea if it was day or night.

She thought about Logan, up on the roof of the barn. He would come for her, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She hated the fact that she’d been put in a situation where she needed rescuing. And now she felt like some plump rabbit, staked out as bait. Once Sturgess had Logan, he’d either kill him outright or hand him over to the Sheriff, and then he wouldn’t have any need for her anymore. 

The brass handle of the door swiveled, and her eyes snapped to it. The door swung open, and there was Sturgess, grinning. His tiny eyes twinkled, the dim light of the room casting shadows in the crags of his face. 

He stepped into the room, his man Winston only a step behind him, closing the door behind them.

“This is not how I wanted things to go,” Sturgess said, but his face told a different story. He took a deep breath and stepped in front of her. The woman was laughing again in the other room. From somewhere else in the house, she heard someone start to play the piano, a jaunty saloon song. 

She glared at him, not bothering to try to speak or struggle. 

“You put yourself here, though,” Sturgess went on. Winston stood there like some kind of weird little porcelain doll, expressionless. She wanted to kill them both, almost chiding herself for wavering on the thought of letting Logan shoot him with the rifle. 

“I made you an offer on your land in good faith,” Sturgess said. “And what did you do? You laid a trap for me.” He leaned down so that his eyes were on the same level as hers. “Well now it’s my turn. I don’t know how your little outlaw made it out of the Sheriff’s jail, but he isn’t going back there. When he comes for you, and he will come, I’m going to mete out my own punishment. Or rather, Winston here will. He’s been itching to do some work with that knife of his. And when we’re done with him, I’ll have to think long and hard about what to do with you.”

He leaned even closer, and Sally pulled back. He planted a little kiss on her forehead, then straightened up. 

“If you’re lucky, I’ll decide to let you live,” he said.  “Perhaps we could put you to work in this very establishment.” He spread his arms out and looked at the ceiling. “Why, I bet some of the boys around here would pay a pretty penny for a roll in the hay with you. Don’t you think?”

You could damn sure try
, she thought. But unless they kept her tied down, she was going to pull the balls off anybody who tried to climb on top of her. 

Sturgess looked back down at her and sighed. “All right,” he said. “Time to go. I have other matters to attend to. Winston here will be watching over you, though. Just not in plain sight.” He nodded at Winston, then they both left Sally alone once more.

She struggled against the ropes as she listened to the sounds of the women pleasuring men in the other rooms. But it was no use. The knots were expertly tied, probably by that baby-faced monster Sturgess employed. 

She waited, and tried to think. She heard the clock in the parlor chime ten times, though whether that was in the morning or at night, she didn’t know. She sat and waited until it chimed eleven. 

At some point they’d have to give her some water. But maybe not. The pain in her head and subsided to a low thump that ached with the beat of her heart. But now she was thirsty, and having her mouth bound didn’t help.

Sometime shortly after the eleventh chime, the doorknob began to swivel again. She snapped her head around to look, wondering who it might be. Maybe one of the girls, coming to bring her food and water. Maybe she could talk her way out of this if the girl ungagged her. Maybe it was Sturgess, come to gloat and threaten once again. Or maybe it was him…

The door swung open slowly and out of the shadows stepped Sheriff Willard Hoskins. Sally furrowed her brow in confusion. The Sheriff had always treaded a thin line between turning a blind eye to Sturgess and his activities and actually trying to enforce the law. She didn’t think he was a bad man, mostly a good one caught in a tough situation. If he’d stood up too much to Sturgess, he’d probably lose his job. 

He held up his finger to his lips and softly closed the door behind him.
Oh God
, she thought.
He's here to rescue me.

He moved slowly closer to her, and she was somewhat heartened to see he was wearing his gun. 

“One of my boys spotted you being carried into town,” he whispered. “Don’t you worry, Miss Macintosh. We’re gonna get you out of here.”

She tried to speak through the gag, muffled noises coming out instead. It was a trap. She needed to tell him.

“Now you need to keep quiet,” he said, bending down to take a knife out of his boot. “I’ll have you out of that chair in a second, and we’ll be on our way.”

The Sheriff stood up, the knife in his hand. He started to lean forward toward the ropes, then his whole body stiffened. His eyes grew wide, bugging out. He dropped the knife, which fell to the carpeted floor with a light thud.

Sally watched in horror as a pinprick of red formed on the Sheriff’s chest, just below his silver badge. Something poked through, the tip of a knife, and the red spot bloomed into a flower.

She looked down and saw the shadow behind him, a second pair of feet. God, he had moved so quietly. Had he been in the room the whole time, or had he somehow snuck in here after the Sheriff?

She looked back up to the Sheriff’s face, a look of shock and disbelief, mixed with horrible pain. It was that look of so many dying men, the look that asked
Why me? Why now?

The Sheriff gargled and tried to say something, futile last words, as blood spilled out of the side of his mouth. Then she heard the sickening sound of the knife being pushed further, and the tip protruded from the Sheriff’s chest a good two or three inches.