Chapter 22
Something hot and wet was on my upper lip, and my mouth was full of the iron taste of it. I knew before I'd opened my eyes that my nose was broken again. Hell. I'd just gotten that nose set last night, and now it was set crooked again. Ransom was going to give me an earful about it.
Ransom.
Where was Ransom?
I tried to open my eyes, and there was nothing to open them to.
It was dark. No, scratch that. There was a cloth on my face, some kind of hood.
I made myself lie still and listen, because moving in the dark would get my throat cut, and whoever had put a hood on me hadn't done it because they liked me.
I was in a truck bed, on my side. My hands were behind my back, and they weren't moving how I wanted them to. Someone had tied me up with a length of old rope. Okay, bad, but not the end of the world. Not yet.
Then everything else came online at once, and I was sorry it had.
My ribs. Christ, my ribs. Every time the truck hit something, pain shot through my torso, and I gritted my teeth against it.
My arm was wet inside the sleeve. I couldn't see it, but the cold of it sat against my skin, and some of the stitches had pulled. There wasn't enough blood for me to be bleeding out, but there was enough to be a problem. If there was a later for it to be a problem in.
The back of my head was its own conversation. Somebody had hit me with something hard. I remembered the trough and going down, but after that I didn't remember anything.
The last I'd seen of Ransom, he had been climbing the arroyo lip away from me with his back set, and he had been alive.
If Ransom was dead, I didn't want to be alive for the next part.
Stop it, Winston. Can't think like that. Focus on what you can do.
The truck slowed onto a dirt road, then asphalt, then a turn, and gravel, and a stop.
This was where it was happening, then, wherever this was.
Two men were talking in the cab. A door slammed. A third opened the tailgate, got me under the arms, and pulled. My ribs lit up so bright I made a sound I'd rather have kept to myself. My stomach turned over, and I swallowed back bile.
"Easy, sweetheart," a voice said. "Boss wants you walkin' and talkin'."
Sweetheart was a new one.
They walked me, and I counted: twelve steps on gravel, up two wooden steps, across a porch, through a door, down a hall, through another door. The counting was the only thing keeping me upright. Hammering started somewhere, faint through the hood, and I had a bad feeling about it.
Hands pushed me down into a hardback chair.
Somebody untied my wrists from each other and tied them to the arms, one each.
I tested it and it held, and that scared me.
Whoever had tied it had done it before. I'd been around men who tied other men to chairs, and none of those men had been good company.
The hammering was clearer now. I could pick out the men working: the rasp of a saw underneath, hammers on top, somebody calling to somebody else. I'd heard a barn raising once at my granddad's. It sounded like that.
A door closed.
I sat there a while, five minutes maybe twenty, breathing slow because my ribs preferred slow, sweating into the hood. I thought about Ransom on Galahad coming over a ridge somewhere, head down, hat low. It was the only thought that didn't make me sick.
The door opened. One set of boots came in, heels on the hardwood, spurs ringing.
"There he is," Rex said. A chair scraped. "Sit tight, Ranger. I want to look at you a minute. Been a long time coming."
My daddy used to say something about men who liked the sound of their own voices. You didn't have to feed them. They fed themselves.
"Boys did a job on you." His chair creaked. "Otis was thorough. God rest that good man."
"Otis is dead because Ransom Lanza put a knife through his skull," I said. "You can pray for him. Won't help."
He didn't answer right away.
"Now Otis. Otis worked for me twenty-two years, son. Twenty-two years. A man works for you that long, you start to think you know what he is. Then somebody puts a knife in him and, well." He clicked his tongue. "Lord giveth, the Lord taketh. We will miss him."
His chair scraped back. He was savoring this. I'd heard plenty of men savor a small win. Rex Rawlins didn't deal in small wins.
His hand came down on the top of the hood.
"Let's get you a look."
He pulled the hood off slowly.
The light hit me, and I had to close my eyes.
When I opened them, I was looking through a wide doorway, eight feet across, framed in raw lumber.
The yard beyond it was packed dirt, and on the dirt five carpenters worked a structure of new pine, sap still wet on the cut ends.
Two posts were up and a crossbeam lay in the dirt waiting.
A man on his knees squared a trapdoor frame with a level.
Sawhorses, two-by-fours, and a coil of fresh rope sat on a workbench off to the side.
It took me a second to understand what I was looking at. When I did, my stomach dropped, and the fear that had been sitting in my chest since the truck bed climbed up into my throat and settled there.
"Well now, ain't she pretty," he said. "Local boys.
Good carpenters. I told 'em historical accuracy, and they took to it.
Same kind of gallows they hung Tom Ketchum off of in 1901.
Different kind of show tonight." He pulled his chair around so he could look at me and the gallows at the same time.
"Crowd's gonna love it. The crowd loves a classic. "
"All this for me? I'm flattered."
His lips pulled back in a wide grin. "Now we're talkin'."
Rex pulled a pack of cigarillos from his suit pocket, set one between his teeth, and lit it with a kitchen match struck off his thumbnail.
"Let's start with Roy Castillo," he said.
I closed my fists on the rope.
"Now, Roy Castillo. I tried to buy that man for eight years, son. Roy wouldn't take a coffee on the house. Wouldn't take a cigar at Christmas. Wouldn't sit at my table if I had three open booths and a comp ticket in my hand. Roy ate at Rafe Lujan's table."
"That tracks," I said. "Roy had taste."
The saw outside cut through pine and stopped.
"And the water rights case came down to Roy.
Twenty thousand acre-feet a year between Bonney and Pae Saco, and Roy on the bench.
He'd been holding that decision for three months.
Called me a week ago and said he wanted to take a meal at the dinner theater.
Just the two of us. I knew what was coming. "
Rex tipped ash onto the floor.
"Roy walked in on a Tuesday. Alone. Cassidy seated him. He told her he'd been meaning to come see the show for a year and finally had a free night for it. Ordered the Billy burrito and a coffee. Two-pound burrito. You finish it, your picture goes on the wall. Said he wanted the picture."
Rex drew on the cigarillo.
"So I came, and I sat down with him and made him a final offer.
Roy didn't say no. Roy said something polite and tried to wave it off.
I asked him again. I said the number this time.
The real number. And Roy looked at me like a man who'd been holding his temper for eight years and didn't have any temper left to hold.
Then he told me he was ruling for Pae Saco.
Said it was a clean case, and the law was the law.
Said it like he hadn't meant to say it and now couldn't take it back.
Then he ate the burrito anyway. Every bite.
Took his picture on the way out and walked into the lot like the world was his. "
He blew smoke into the air.
"Now Roy. Roy didn't fight. Sixty-one years old, and he'd lived a long time.
Otis got him into the truck bed and drove him toward the back pasture.
Rope went on his ankles. Truck went into gear.
Roy went along behind it for about a quarter mile of caliche road.
Otis stopped at the halfway point to check him.
Said Roy quoted scripture at him. Couldn't remember which.
I told Otis. I said, Otis. It don't matter. "
Rex waved the cigarillo around, trailing ash.
"Then they finished the drag. Otis put a nine in the back of his head, and they dropped him on Pae Saco land. Courtesy. Rafe Lujan had been needing a reminder about courtesy for some time. About what happens to men who eat at his table and not mine."
The yard outside went quiet. A carpenter laughed at something, and the hammering started again.
"You done?" I said.
"Hardly, Ranger."
"I worked Roy's body in the morgue. I read the autopsy. You haven't told me anything I didn't know before."
"You knew it. You didn't know it from me." Rex tapped ash. "Different thing."
I gave him nothing. But my hands shook in the rope, small, where he couldn't see, and my back teeth locked together hard enough to ache. I knew exactly what Roy had felt while it was happening to him, and I couldn't put that knowledge back where it had come from.
A phone rang in Rex's pocket. He pulled it out, looked at it, held up a finger to me, and took the call.
"Yeah." Pause. "I told you. Doors stay closed tonight.
The whole place." Pause. "I don't care how many reservations are on the books.
Refund 'em or don't, I don't care. Send the kitchen home.
Send Bee home. Keep the gate boys and the bar boys, that's it.
" Pause. "Because tonight is private, Cassidy. Private. You hear me?" He hung up.
He put the phone away.
The gallows had a crossbeam now. Three men lifted it on a rope while a fourth steadied.
Rex stood, walked to the doorway, and looked out at his carpenters with his back to me, the white suit catching the sun on the brim of the Stetson.
"Your daddy," Rex said.
"Don't," I warned. "Don't you dare say his name."
"I knew your daddy in the Young County days. We worked the same circles. Cattle off the books, paper that didn't always balance. He was good at what he did. Better than me at the time."