At Home in the Dark Page 4

  Malone swung the belt and caught Texas in the face with the buckle. Stung, Texas stumbled. Malone kicked his feet out from under him and grabbed the pistol from the GI’s waistband. He put the nozzle against the man’s sternum and pulled the trigger. On one knee, he turned and shot Deep South in the forehead. In less than a minute, he had the cash and their wallets. He ripped the keys out of Texas’s pocket and drove off toward the cove where he and Lailani had spent the afternoon. He’d wait for the rest of them to come. A couple of weeks in the brig for missing curfew would be worth the taste of revenge.

  He settled in a crevice, back to the wall, gun drawn.

  • • •

  Then came the first of more than 300 Jap bombers. Malone heard the earth-rattling explosions. He moved deeper into the cold cave. In the next horrific hours, hundreds of U.S. military personnel were slaughtered. When the raid ended and an eerie tranquility took hold, Malone drove back to the base. In the distance, the island burned, black smoke billowed and the scent of gasoline filling the sky. Dead birds littered the ground.

  He discovered the base was in shambles. One of the Jap bombers dropped his payload on the barracks where his unit slept. Most of his outfit was killed, maimed or knocked to their knees. No one remembered Billy Malone had been off-site.

  Malone gave a long moment’s thought to laying low and heading out. He’d be listed MIA and could start from zero—no record, no history. He’d go to Los Angeles. It was filled with broads like Lailani and with marks like the Chinaman. He knew the big game now. With his blond hair and green eyes, he’d reinvent himself. A Swede. A German who got out before Hitler and the Third Reich. A regular American. He could make it work.

  No, he decided, knee-deep in debris. He’d wait out the war and go back to the Bronx. The streets were in his blood. He knew the rooftops and alleyways. Theft came naturally, violence did too. If the next few years broke his way, he could bankroll a future, playing steady amid the turmoil. Then he’d go back home a champion. He’d aim high. The cops wouldn’t dare touch him.

  About a week after the attack, everybody on high alert, Billy Malone drove a Jeep to the club where he’d been the mark. War or no, he was still out to punish.

  But a bomb had leveled the club too, the fire scorching the surrounding property, incinerating the dead and the living. Bodies had been removed. The charred corpses of automobiles remained.

  He sent a Christmas card to Judge Steigel, who had shone on him the light of good fortune.

  “Thanks for everything,” he wrote. He signed it “Very truly yours, Billy Malone. Pearl Harbor, December 1941.”

  Night Rounds

  James Reasoner

  Dave Blake grasped the doorknob and tried to twist it, but it didn’t turn. He nodded in satisfaction. Trammell’s Hardware Store was locked up tight for the night, just like it was supposed to be. Blake moved on down the boardwalk to check the door of the next business.

  This was his favorite time of day and favorite part of the job of marshal. Night had fallen over Wagontongue. Most folks were in their homes and had had their supper. Some had turned in already while others sat in parlors, reading by lamplight or singing old songs with the family gathered around the piano. The Lucky Cuss, Wagontongue’s only saloon, was still open, but on a week night like this, not many customers would be there and they wouldn’t be in any mood to cause a ruckus. Sam Dorn, who owned the place, would likely call it a night and close up soon.

  Peace reigned over the settlement . . . just the way Dave Blake liked it.

  He’d held down the marshal’s job for a little over a year, Wagontongue being the latest in a string of towns where he had worn the badge. Some lawmen settled down in one place and stayed there most of their lives. Dave Blake had never been that way. He’d always felt too many restless stirrings after he’d been somewhere for a while, an urge telling him that he needed to get up and go somewhere else. It was hard on his wife Clarissa, he knew, but he couldn’t help it.

  The job here in Wagontongue was one of the easiest he’d had. Outlaws didn’t have any interest in a sleepy little cowtown like this. The only trouble came when cowboys from the spreads between here and the Prophets rode into town, drank too much busthead at the Lucky Cuss, and got proddy enough to start fights. Blake always managed to break those up without having to resort to gunplay.

  He touched his Colt’s walnut grips now. Except for target practice, knocking airtights off fence posts, he hadn’t fired the gun in five years. As tranquil as Wagontongue was, that streak was likely to continue.

  He checked the door of Bennett’s saddle shop. Locked. Blake started to move on.

  “Marshal, is that you?”

  The voice came from behind him, made him pause and half-turn. A man-shaped patch of darkness came along the boardwalk toward him, not really hurrying but moving along pretty briskly. Blake hadn’t recognized the voice, so he said, “Yeah, it’s me. Who’s there?”

  “Jack Hargis. I ride for the Circle P.”

  Blake didn’t know the name, but that wasn’t surprising. Cowhands moved in and out of the area all the time. Round-up would be coming along soon, so the ranchers were taking on extra hands.

  “What can I do for you, Hargis?”

  The man waved a hand in the general direction of the Lucky Cuss, at the other end of town and on the opposite side of the street.

  “I think some fellas down there are fixin’ to cause trouble, Marshal. You might want to go read ’em from the book.”

  “My rounds will take me that way in a few minutes. I’ll look in on the place when I get there. I always do.”

  Blake didn’t mention that Sam Dorn usually treated him to a short beer, and from there he went on home where Clarissa would be waiting for him with a late supper. It was a mighty nice way to finish off the day, which was another reason Blake enjoyed making these rounds. He had something to look forward to.

  “I don’t know, Marshal,” Hargis said as he stepped closer. “It looked kind of serious to me. I’m not sure you should wait.”

  “I appreciate you speaking up, but I’ll get to it.” Blake’s tone was a little more impatient now. He never had cared for people telling him how to do his job.

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” Hargis said as Blake turned to resume his routine.

  Blake heard cloth rustle behind him, and then pain hit him in the side like a fist, driving him a step to the right. He gasped, as much surprised as hurt, and tried to turn back and fight, but Hargis crowded into him hard and knocked him to his knees. Hargis’s left arm went around Blake’s neck and closed tight. He reached down with his right hand and plucked the Colt from its holster.

  Hargis put his mouth next to Blake’s ear and said, “You feel that, you son of a bitch? Feel that blood running down your side? I could’ve gutted you, but I didn’t. Just one nice clean stab wound . . . for now. Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  With Hargis’s forearm clamped across his throat like an iron bar, Blake couldn’t do anything except grunt. Hargis was right, though: the wound hurt clean to Blake’s core, bad enough to spread out and fill his mind and body.

  “I could cut your throat,” Hargis went on. “Still might. But not yet. No, sir, not yet.”

  He was a strong man. He heaved and lifted Blake back onto his feet. Blake wanted to fight, but his muscles wouldn’t do what he told them to. All he could do was stumble along as Hargis dragged him backward along the boardwalk and into an alley.

  The man was going to kill him back here and leave him in the dirt and the trash, Blake thought. And he had no idea why.

  Hargis didn’t stop in the alley to finish the job, though. He kept dragging Blake along, coming into one of the small side streets and then backing toward a large whitewashed building with a number of cottonwood trees around it. Blake was dizzy and disoriented, no doubt because of the blood soaking his shirt on the left side, but he saw enough of his surroundings to realize what Hargis was doing.

  Hargis was draggin
g him toward the Baptist church.

  Unlike the businesses in town, the church was never locked. Blake heard his captor fumbling at the door, then Hargis manhandled him into the sanctuary’s dark interior. A kick closed the door behind them. Their steps echoed in the big room with its stained-glass windows on the sides.

  Hargis wrestled him all the way up the aisle between the rows of pews until they reached the front where the preacher’s pulpit stood. There, Hargis dropped him. Blake’s legs buckled and he sprawled on the hardwood floor.

  The preacher, Timothy Foulger, was going to be mighty annoyed with him for getting blood all over the floor like this. Blake knew that was a crazy thought to be having right now, but he couldn’t help it.

  A match rasped. Orange flame spurted. Hargis held it to the wick of a lantern, and when the wick caught, he lowered the chimney and set the lantern on the pulpit. Darkness swallowed the wavering yellow glow before it reached the corners, but the light was enough to reveal Blake lying there with Hargis looming over him.

  Although, as Blake looked up and tried to focus his fuzzy vision on his attacker, he said, “I . . . I know you. Your name’s not Hargis. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

  It couldn’t be. The face was a lot thinner, the eyes sunken, the cheekbones sharp against the skin. But the same general lines were there. Blake forced his brain to work, thought about how the man would look twenty pounds heavier and five years younger.

  And a crushing burden of grief and hate lighter.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “I’m Wesley Holman.”

  “I thought . . . you were dead . . . Somebody said . . . you were shot in Pueblo.”

  “Shot. Not killed. I was laid up for a long time, but that didn’t matter. Just gave me more time to think about how I was going to catch up with you one of these days. Or nights, as it turned out.”

  Holman had stuck Blake’s gun behind his belt. He didn’t appear to be carrying a gun of his own. He pulled the Colt, pointed it down at Blake, and eased back the hammer. Blake stared at him. Anger, fear, sickness from the pain of the knife wound kept him from doing anything else.

  Holman laughed and lowered the hammer.

  “Not yet,” he said again. “I have to show you something first.”

  He set the gun on the pulpit beside the lantern. Then he reached under his shirt and took out a small oilcloth-wrapped bundle with string tied around it. He untied the string, put it in his pocket, then laid the bundle on the pulpit, too, and unwrapped it.

  Inside was a folded piece of cloth. Holman unfolded it into a section about a foot square and held it up so Blake could see it. The cloth was white silk. In the middle of it was a small round hole, and a dark brown circular stain maybe four inches in diameter surrounded that hole.

  “You know what this is, don’t you, Marshal? I cut it out of my wife’s wedding dress after the undertaker gave it back to me. My first thought was to have her buried in the dress, but later I was glad I didn’t. This way, I was able to keep her heart’s blood right next to my heart . . . ever since you killed her.”

  The groan that came from Blake was part pain, part regret.

  “It was an accident, Holman, you know that. I never meant for her to be hurt. I . . . I was just trying to stop . . .”

  “You were just trying to stop Harv Dailey, I know that. Everybody in town knew that. The brave lawman, just doing his job, going after the man who’d robbed the bank. Running right into the teeth of Dailey’s gunfire. You didn’t even stop when he shot you. You got off two more rounds of your own. The second one killed Dailey.” Holman leaned over and shook the piece of blood-stained silk at Blake. “But the first one killed my wife!”

  Blake closed his eyes, unable to stand the sight. He couldn’t shut out the memories, though. They were as vivid as they’d ever been. The running gun battle along the street of that Kansas settlement, Harv Dailey unable to get back to his horse because the marshal had reacted too quickly to the sound of shots coming from the bank, the screams as people scattered, the booming gun-thunder, the hammerblow of a bullet striking his left leg and knocking it out from under him . . .

  When Blake had gone down, Dailey had paused, a grin stretching across his face. This was his chance to kill the lawman, and then he could steal a horse and there wouldn’t be anybody to come after him. Blake had seen death grinning right at him, so he had overcome the pain of his wounded leg and rushed two shots just as Dailey pulled the trigger again.

  Blake had had no idea at the time that one of his bullets had missed the bank robber, gone on down the street, and struck Deborah Curtis—Deborah Curtis Holman, as of a few minutes earlier—in the chest just as she and her new husband stepped out the doors of the church where they’d just been married. He didn’t find out until hours later, because he had passed out from being shot himself. He didn’t even know that his second shot had killed Harv Dailey.

  Of course, he was all too aware of everything later. He had spent many nights trying to fall asleep when all he could see was the woman’s crumpled, bloody form—even though he hadn’t seen it in real life. The vision was plenty real enough for him.

  Clarissa tried to help, of course, and so did his friends. It was a terrible tragedy, they said, an accident that nobody could have foreseen, but it wasn’t Blake’s fault, they all said. There were no charges against him. Nobody blamed him.

  But none of that eased the guilt Blake felt. He kept expecting Wes Holman to come to him and confront him, rage at him, even throw a punch at him. Blake wouldn’t have blamed him for any of that.

  But Holman left town shortly after burying his new bride, and every so often somebody got word of where he was and what he was doing. He got in trouble a lot—he’d always been a hothead of sorts, but everybody thought once he married Deborah Curtis, the storekeeper’s girl, he would settle down—and nobody was too surprised when they heard about him getting in gunfights. The news that he’d been shot down in Pueblo came as no shock.

  Not long after that, Blake turned in his badge and accepted the marshal’s job in another town . . . then another and another . . . until he and Clarissa landed here in Wagontongue. And sometimes days, weeks, even months went by without him thinking about what had happened up there in Kansas. When it did come to mind, he still regretted it, but there was nothing he could do to change the past. He had tried to be a good man, a good marshal, ever since, and that had to be enough.

  “You killed her,” Holman said again. “Killed my wife.”

  “I’m . . . sorry,” Blake managed to say.

  “You reckon that’s good enough?” Holman shook his head. “Not hardly, Blake. Sorry never changed a thing.”

  Blake’s mouth was dry. He tried to swallow and couldn’t. He closed his eyes and said, “Go ahead . . . Kill me.”

  “Not yet. You’ll bleed to death in a while. I made sure to stick you good and deep. I wish I could take you back up there where it happened . . . drag you in that church where Deborah and I promised we’d be together until . . . until death did us part. But this one will have to do. You just lay right there until my friend gets here.”

  That confused Blake. He said, “Your . . . friend?”

  “Yeah. Fella named Ab Newton. You may have heard of him.”

  Blake knew the name, all right. He had seen it on reward posters. Newton was a gunman, a hired killer, a vicious outlaw who was wanted across several states and territories. Blake had no idea how Holman had fallen in with him, but it didn’t matter.

  Holman placed the piece of blood-stained silk on the pulpit and then took out a pocket watch to check the time.

  “Ab’s going to be bringing somebody else with him. In fact, he ought to be collecting her right about now.”

  Already, Blake had begun to feel a chill stealing over him. That was from losing so much blood, he thought. But Holman’s words made him even colder. Cold right down to the bone.

  “Clarissa?” he whispered.

  “That’s right. She’s goin
g to die right in front of you, Blake, the way my wife died in front of me. And then maybe—if you’re lucky—I’ll cut your throat. Or maybe I’ll just leave you here to bleed to death while you’re staring into her dead eyes. What do you think? What should I do?”

  Blake groaned again. He curled up on himself and began to make gagging sounds as he struggled to breathe.

  Holman’s eyes widened in alarm. He leaned over, closer to Blake, and said, “Damn it, no! It’s not time. She’s not here yet. You’re not going to die, you son of a—”

  Blake had drawn both legs up as he pretended to choke. Now he lifted and straightened them, driving both boot heels into Holman’s hip. The desperate kick sent Holman crashing into the pulpit. It overturned as Holman fell to the floor.

  The lantern landed right beside him and broke. Kerosene splattered over Holman’s clothes, and flames shot up as the fuel caught fire. Holman screamed and rolled but just managed to catch himself on fire even more.

  Blake tried to stand up but couldn’t make it. He hitched himself along the floor instead as he tried to reach the gun, which had also fallen from the pulpit along with the oilcloth and the piece of wedding dress. He got a hand on the Colt and pulled it toward him. Ragged footsteps made him roll onto his shoulder and look around.

  Holman was on his feet again, lurching around as his clothes continued to burn. His hair was on fire, too, and his mouth was wide open but no screams came from it. He tried to rush toward Blake, but he collapsed after only a couple of steps and lay face down, unmoving, as flames continued to leap on and around him.

  Blake pushed himself onto his butt and scooted away. He bumped one of the pews, reached up and got hold of it, hauled himself to his feet. Clarissa was all he could think about. Gritting his teeth against the pain and weakness that filled him, he stumbled toward the doors. The floor was on fire and the flames were spreading and smoke already clogged the air. Blake coughed as he fumbled one of the doors open and staggered out into the gloriously cool and clean night.