Chapter 5 #3
"The problem," Joe said, "is that the minute my wife is useful to you, she stops being safe. Because the day comes when Merrit gets worse, and she will, and on that day you are a man with eleven trucks and a filing cabinet and nothing left to lose, and my wife is the only person who ever helped."
Arlan Crowe was silent.
"You've thought about that," Joe said.
"Every hour since Tuesday."
"And?"
"And I don't have an answer for you," Crowe said. "I could lie. I'm good at it, you've seen me do it on the radio. But you'd know, and then we'd have nothing."
He took his hat off.
He held it against his chest, the same way he had held it on the road yesterday, and Joe understood suddenly and completely that this was simply what the man did, that it was a tic from a childhood in a church somewhere, and that it had nothing to do with respect at all.
"So instead I'll give you the truth," Crowe said. "If my daughter is dying and your wife is the only thing between her and that, I will come up this road with everything I have and I will not stop for anything, and the fact that we shook hands in October will not matter to me for one second."
"Then why would I ever agree."
"Because the alternative is that day arrives anyway," Crowe said, "and it arrives in February, with me knowing nothing about you except what's in a file, and the whole thing goes the way yesterday went."
He put the hat back on.
"You can't stop that day from coming, Mister Henfry. Neither can I. The only thing either of us can do is arrange for it to arrive as late as possible, and for us to know each other by then."
The wind came down off the ridge and moved through the timber and went on.
Joe stood at the gate for a long time.
"I want three things," he said.
"Say them."
"One. You never come up this road at night. Not once, not for any reason, not if the world's on fire. Anything after dark is an attack and I will treat it as one."
"Agreed."
"Two. The invoices. Every page with my name on it, and every page with the name of every family on this road, in my hand, at this gate, before anything else happens."
Crowe's jaw moved.
"That's expensive."
"That's the price."
"You know I've read them."
"I know you've read them," Joe said. "I want the paper anyway. Because paper's the whole game, and the day you're dead, I want to be very sure that whoever takes your chair doesn't inherit a list with my daughter on it."
Arlan Crowe looked at him with something that was almost warmth.
"That's a good reason," he said. "Agreed."
"Three."
Joe pointed.
"That revolver goes in the ground with him."
Crowe's hand went to the ivory grip.
"He's not in the ground."
"Then put him in it," Joe said. "Wherever you've got him. You bury Stance Ulebrook properly, with that gun on him, and you tell me where, and I will go and stand there and I will not do one single thing except stand there. And until that happens, there is no deal, and there is no Tuesday,
and there is no four hours."
Crowe's fingers moved on the grip.
"You understand what you're asking," he said.
"I'm asking you to put a hundred dollars of steel in the dirt."
"I'm not talking about the gun," Crowe said. "I'm talking about the fact that my men watched me take it off him, and if I bury it they'll know why, and then every one of them knows there's a man on this mountain who can make me do something."
"Yes," Joe said.
They stood there.
And Arlan Crowe, very slowly, unbuckled the crossdraw rig and pulled it free of his belt and held the whole thing out at arm's length by the holster.
"Thursday," he said. "I'll bury him Thursday, on the bench above his own barn, and I'll send a man to tell you where, and you can come and stand and nobody will touch you."
He walked forward ten yards and laid the gun rig down in the middle of the road on the gravel.
Then he backed up.
"But I'm not carrying it down this hill in front of you," he said. "So you come get it, and you keep it until Thursday, and on Thursday you bring it to the hole and you put it in yourself."
Joe looked at the rig lying in the road.
Fifty yards of open gravel between him and it. Nine men behind it. A rifle rest at his hip and a boy in a ditch and a man in a blowdown.
He knew exactly what it was.
"That's a test," he said.
"Everything's a test, Mister Henfry."
Joe stepped over the chain.
He walked out into the open road with his hands empty, and he felt every single one of those nine men watching, and he did not hurry and he did not slow down.
He crouched and picked up the rig.
The leather was warm.
He stood up, twenty yards from Arlan Crowe, close enough now to see that the man's eyes were a pale washed out blue and that there was a tremor in his left hand that he was holding still by pressing it against his thigh.
"Tuesday," Crowe said quietly. "First Tuesday after the burial. I'll bring her at ten."
"Bring the invoices."
"I'll bring the invoices."
Joe turned and walked back.
He was eleven steps from the chain when the shot came.
It came from up the mountain, from behind him, from high on the right, and the flat crack of it rolled down the canyon and off the far bank and came back, and Joe Henfry felt the wind of the bullet go past his ear.