Unspeakable (52 page)

Until, finally, he was there.

Garnering all his strength, he climbed the jamb, hand over hand, pulling himself up, willing strength into his legs that already felt cold and lifeless. Once on his feet, he spotted the pistol. It seemed a mile away, although it lay on the porch not more than a few feet beyond the door. He wouldn't have the time or the strength to reload. How many bullets had been fired? Three?

Four? At least two remained, he thought. Maybe three. But bullets would be no damn use to him if he couldn't get to the pistol.

Moving only by a sheer act of will, he stepped across the threshold. Adrenaline alone allowed him to bend down and pick up the gun. Raising his arm took a thousand times more strength than he had, but he did it, by God, and aimed the pistol at the center of the hired hand's back. In his peripheral vision he saw the woman pop up from behind the pickup.

"Jack!"

They had lied to him! Lied to Cecil. Like saps they had believed she was a deaf mute. Dumb fucking Cecil. He'd swallowed their phony story and fed it to Carl, and like a fool he'd bought it, too.

Jack. Is that what she'd said? Jack. Good name for a jokester.

Smiling because the last laugh was on them, Carl pulled the trigger.

The man went down. Carl angled his arm slightly to the right and pointed the pistol at the bitch who had tricked him.

***

Ezzy stood up, startling Carl and drawing his attention away from Anna Corbett. "Hey, Carl, remember me?"

Carl's mouth went slack with astonishment. He hadn't known anyone was there. He sure as hell hadn't figured on it being one of his sworn enemies.

"Drop the gun," Ezzy said calmly, hoping Carl wouldn't.

He didn't. He fired.

Simultaneously Ezzy pulled the trigger of his .357.

But his arm recoiled at the same instant, throwing his aim off, and sending the pistol flying out of his hand and into the flower bed.

The bullet smacked into the support column of the porch, splintering the wood, but doing Carl no damage whatsoever.

Carl laughed. Ezzy stared into the bore of his pistol.

***

Jack rolled to his side and looked behind him just as Ezzy Hardge and Carl Herbold fired simultaneously. He didn't think about it. Didn't hesitate. He didn't reckon with God or the devil, or ask why it was left to him, or consider the consequences. He acted on instinct. He threw his knife.

***

The knife struck as Carl fired.

It pierced his chest so deeply that only the handle was left sticking out and it quivered from the stunning impact.

For several seconds Ezzy didn't know why he wasn't dead.

Gauging by Carl's expression, he was bumfuddled too. Ezzy gazed stupidly at the knife. Carl tilted his head down and saw the carved handle protruding from his chest and opened his mouth to scream, but only blood bubbled out.

He staggered backward, but he was dead before he hit the porch.

Ezzy, jerked backward from the edge of his own grave, glanced into the yard, where Anna Corbett was kneeling beside Jack. She had his head cradled in her lap. The kid was beside her, crying. But the man's legs were moving. He was alive.

After retrieving his pistol from the bed of petunias, Ezzy climbed the front steps and paused to look down at Carl. He'd always had an ego big as Dallas. He would hate knowing that he hadn't died handsome. There was a real dumb expression on his face.

Ezzy moved past him and cautiously stepped inside the house. The entry hall of Anna Corbett's home looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse. Lomax lay supine, obviously dead from a gunshot wound in his chest.

Myron Hutts was lying against the wall in a fetal position, babbling in a low murmur. Ezzy approached him with apprehension, but the man put up no resistance when Ezzy knelt beside him. "Give me your hands, Myron." Docilely, Hutts extended his hands, and Ezzy locked restraints on his wrists, then holstered his pistol.

"Is Carl mad at me?"

"Carl's dead."

"Oh."

"You're bleeding pretty bad, Myron."

"It hurts."

"Think you can stand up?"

"Okay." Ezzy assisted him to his feet and guided him past Lomax. He didn't give the body a second glance. Nor did he seem to notice Carl as he shuffled his big feet over the threshold and stepped outside. "Can I have a PayDay?"

"Sure, Myron."

"And a Popsicle?"

"Once we get you to the hospital I'll see what I can do."

Emergency vehicles and patrol cars were screaming up the drive. Ezzy was shocked to realize that it had been only a few minutes since he'd arrived at the gate. It wouldn't have surprised him to learn that a million years had elapsed since then. It seemed at least that long. He turned Myron over to a pair of arresting officers who read him his rights even as a team of paramedics started working on him. He was telling them about the promised candy bar and Popsicle.

Another paramedic ordered Ezzy to lie down on the porch until the gurney arrived.

"What the hell for?" he asked querulously.

The young woman looked at him with perplexity. "Well, sir, you've been shot." Only then did he become aware of the throbbing pain in his right arm. "Well I'll be damned." Actually he was glad to know Carl had shot him. He thought he had dropped his weapon out of carelessness or just plain old age.

He laughed, causing the young paramedic to regard him with alarm. "No, young lady, I'm not delirious," he told her. He also refused to be placed on a gurney for the short distance to the ambulance. "I can walk it."

"Hey, Ezzy!" Sheriff Ron Foster jogged toward him and fell into step. "Are you all right?"

"Can't complain."

"You did a hell of a job, Ezzy. A hell of a job."

Dismissing the compliment, he asked. "How's Steve Jones?"

"He'll need a lot of physical therapy once they rebuild his knee, but he'll make it."

"He's a good officer. Too bad about Jim."

"Yeah."

"How 'bout him?" He watched as the man who'd saved his life was loaded into an ambulance. Anna Corbett and her boy climbed in behind the gurney.

"Hanging on to consciousness. Could be internal injuries. He's a wait-and-see." Ezzy nodded grimly and his throat felt thick. "I'd be dead, weren't for him."

"Soon as the doctors have patched your arm and you feel up to it, I need to know what happened."

"I don't know what went on inside," he told Foster. "But it must've been bad. It's a wonder they survived."

It wasn't much farther to the ambulance. He wouldn't humiliate himself now by asking for a gurney that he'd refused, but he was feeling a little woozy. He'd lost more blood than he thought. It took some concentration to get his legs to work right.

Foster was saying, "I can't question Mrs. Corbett until we get an interpreter, but when I asked the boy what happened he said that the mean man had shot Mr. Lomax and hit Jack, and that his mother had stabbed the mean man in the leg."

"Anna stabbed him?"

"With Jack's knife."

"The infamous knife," Ezzy muttered.

"Pardon?"

"Nothing." Ezzy saw no point in mentioning the incident between the hired hand and Emory Lomax. Their rivalry—if there ever had been one—was irrelevant now.

"Sheriff Foster?"

A deputy joined them. "Coroner said to give you this. It was plugged into Carl Herbold's chest tighter'n a cork." He handed Foster a plastic evidence bag with the bloody knife sealed inside.

"Thanks." Foster held up the bag and studied the weapon. "This son of a bitch would do a body harm, all right."

"Can I see it?"

The sheriff passed the bag to Ezzy. The knife was as unusual as Lomax's secretary had described it. Mrs. Presley had said it had a bone handle, although to Ezzy it looked more like stag antler. He had thought she was daft when she tried to describe the blade, but damned if it wasn't an iridescent dark blue, and rippled, like the surface of a deep glacier lake stirred by a high wind.

"Hmm. Isn't your run-of-the-mill hunting knife, is it?"

"I'd hate to be on the receiving end of it," Foster replied.

"I've only seen one other knife made like this," Ezzy said. "Years ago a guy here in town had one. Name of John—"

Suddenly Ezzy couldn't catch his breath and his footsteps faltered. He must've swayed dizzily, because Foster reached out to lend support. "Ma'am, I think he's gonna faint." The paramedic slid her arm around Ezzy. "I knew he should've had a gurney." Ezzy struggled to shake her off. "What do they call this?" he rasped, running his finger along the patterned blade of the knife inside the plastic bag.

"Come on, Ezzy. All aboard," the younger sheriff said in a patronizing tone that would have annoyed Ezzy at any time, but never more so than now.

Even with the two of them trying to move him along, he led his legs and refused to budge.

"There's a term for this among knife makers, isn't there? What is it?" He didn't want to get his hopes up if he wasn't right. He wanted someone else to confirm that he was right. But he knew he was right.

"Ezzy—"

"Answer me, goddammit!"

"Uh. it's, uh..." Rapidly snapping his fingers, Foster groped for the word. "Flinting. It's called flinting. Because the Indians used to make knives like this out of flint."

CHAPTER FIFTY

"I
don't think you're supposed to get up, Mr. Hardge." The nurse trainee had entered his room to find him sitting on the edge of the hospital bed.

"I'm fairly sure I'm not supposed to, but I'm going to anyway."

"I'm calling the nurse."

"You're minding your own business," Ezzy snapped. "I got shot in the arm. Nothing to it. No reason I can't walk."

"But you had surgery. You're on an IV."

"I'm fine." He lowered his feet to the floor and stood. "See? Fine. I just want to take a walk down the hall. I'll be back before anybody misses me. So just keep quiet about it, okay?" The rolling IV stand helped support him as he shuffled toward the door. The tile floor was cold on the soles of his feet. With his free hand, he reached behind him to hold together the flimsy hospital gown.

Leaving his room, he turned left down the corridor. He glanced behind him at the young nurse, who was wringing her hands with indecision. He gave her a reassuring thumbs-up. By the time the ambulance had reached the hospital yesterday afternoon, he was high on whatever they'd put into the IV en route. Cora had always said he couldn't take half an aspirin tablet without catching a buzz. In the emergency room he vaguely remembered being probed and prodded, x-rayed and examined, and told that the bullet had passed through his aim without doing too much damage. Nevertheless, they had to operate to clear out debris and bone splinters, assess and repair any muscle damage, and so on. Ezzy lost interest and consciousness at approximately the same time.

This morning he had awakene
d with a bandage around his arm, all-over achiness, a muzziness in his head, and a fire in his belly to speak with the patient in a room down the hall. No LVN or RN

or any other kind of N was going to keep him from it.

He made it down the corridor without being stopped. When he reached the door he sought, he pushed it open and went in. The only sound in the room came from his IV stand; one of the wheels was squeaky. The patient turned his head toward the sound. He looked like he'd been rode hard and put up wet, but Ezzy got the impression that he wasn't sleeping even though his eyes had been closed. Ezzy also got the impression that he wasn't surprised to see him. He said, "Sheriff Hardge."

"Hello, Johnny."

Jack Sawyer smiled ruefully. "I haven't been called that in a while."

"When did you change your name from John Junior?"

He turned his eyes toward the ceiling, giving Ezzy his profile. The resemblance that had escaped Ezzy up till now was so apparent he wondered how he'd missed it. Of course he hadn't been looking for it.

Sawyer continued to stare at the ceiling for several moments. Finally he turned back to Ezzy. "I stopped going by Johnny after that night." Following a short pause, he added, "That night changed more than my name. It changed a lot of things."

The two men shared a long stare, each struck by the magnitude of that understatement. The moment was interrupted when Anna Corbett came in carrying a cup of coffee. Unlike Jack Sawyer, she seemed shocked to see Ezzy. "Good morning, Anna." She smiled at him and, after setting her coffee on the bed tray, wrote something on a tablet and extended it to him. "You don't have to thank me," he said after reading her note. "I'm just glad you and your boy made it out okay. That's the important thing. How's he this morning?"

"He's staying with Marjorie Baker," Jack told him. "She consulted a child psychologist on Anna's behalf. David'll likely need some counseling."

"After a time, he'll be all right. Kids are resilient."

Anna wrote another message for Ezzy on her tablet. "He's worried about Jack and angry at me for not letting him come to the hospital to see him."