House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“He doesn’t mind if I have one or two when I come in.”

Atwood picked up the jar and removed the glass cover. “He’p yourself.”

“You take one, too.”

“No, thanks. There’s something demeaning about a man sucking on candy. I think it’s got something to do with a desire for the mother’s teat.”

“Ride out. And not just out of town. Ride till you’re in a place I’ll never see you again.”

“It’s a free country.”

“Not for you.”

“Have another peppermint,” Atwood said, tilting the jar toward Hackberry. “Get you a shitpile of them.”

“Know why a diamondback rattles?”

“Because he’s fixing to strike you?”

“That’s what stupid people think. He rattles to let you know where he is so you won’t step on him. If you don’t step on him, then he’s not required to bite you.”

“A man learns something new every day,” Atwood said.

Hackberry began walking toward the bat-wing doors, his boots echoing in the cavernous room. A gambler playing solitaire at a felt table looked up, then shifted his gaze to the playing card he had just turned over. The saloon windows were black, running with humidity, a rainy cool smell like sulfur and fish drifting through the doors. He waited to hear Atwood replacing the glass top on the peppermint jar, but instead he heard a duckboard creak behind the bar and then a scraping sound like a heavy object being dragged from a shelf.

Hackberry turned with a fluidity age had not taken from him, and drew the Army Colt, crouching slightly, driving back the hammer with the heel of his left hand, angling the barrel up so the round would clear the top of the bar, squeezing the trigger less than a half second later. The Colt bucked against his palm, a twist of yellow and red flame leaping from the barrel.

But just before the hammer struck the base of the .44 brass cartridge, Hackberry knew the origins of his rage had little to do with Romulus Atwood. Atwood was not a noun, not an adverb, not an adjective, not even a symbol; he was a surrogate, and a piss-poor one at that. The target of Hackberry’s wrath was miles away, probably asleep in his parsonage, dreaming of Ruby and her countrywoman’s breasts and the allure of her thighs and the way she moaned when he entered her. Or tossing with guilt over his new role as an adulterer and a hypocrite and the wrecker of another man’s home.

The ball caught Atwood high up on the chest, just below the collarbone. He crashed against the bottles on the counter behind him but held on to the cut-down double-barrel ten-gauge he had pulled from under the bar. Hackberry fired twice more, splattering blood on the mirror, then shattering it, unsure where his rounds had hit Atwood. One barrel of the ten-gauge went off, pocking buckshot in the tin ceiling, raining down strings of termite-generated sawdust. Hackberry went around the end of the bar and saw Atwood on his back against an ice cooler, trying to lift the ten-gauge again. Hackberry cocked and fired his revolver until the hammer snapped on a spent cartridge. Atwood had lifted one foot in a futile attempt to protect himself; a round had torn through the sole of his boot and exited on the other side and blown away two of his fingers. But these were not the images Hackberry would remember when he thought about the systematic dismemberment of the Undertaker. Three feet in front of him, he swore he saw the minister’s disembodied face painted on the smoke, the blush of innocence on his cheeks, his eyes serene and undisturbed by the gunfire and shattered whiskey bottles and blood speckling the coolers.

Hackberry lifted the shotgun from Atwood’s grasp and broke it open with one hand and shook the fired shell and the unfired shell loose from the chambers, then tossed the shotgun over the bar.

The thumb of Atwood’s bandaged hand was pressed to a hole in his throat, his lips pursed like those of a man who had stepped barefoot on a rusty nail and whose pain was so intolerable he dared not move. Atwood pulled at Hackberry’s pants leg with his other hand.

“I cain’t he’p you,” Hackberry said.

Atwood’s voice gurgled in the back of his mouth. Hackberry holstered his revolver and squatted down, his knees popping. “You want a preacher to read over you?”

“How?” Atwood whispered.

“How what?”

“How did you—”

“How did I know you were about to back-shoot me? I didn’t hear you put the cover back on Mr. Bill’s peppermint jar and set it on the shelf, like you were supposed to. So I knew you were headed for the scatter gun.”

Atwood closed his eyes and then opened them again, as though losing consciousness or perhaps because he couldn’t accept the fact that such an insignificant choice had cost him his life.

“If you believe in perdition, this is your last chance to avoid it, Doctor. Want to tell me the truth about Ruby and the minister?” Hackberry said. His eyes were veiled as he waited and hoped that Atwood would not sense his desperation and terrible need to purge himself of the poison Atwood had planted in his soul.

A word seemed to form in Atwood’s throat, then die in a grin on the edge of his mouth. His eyes remained open, staring at nothing, while a spider crawled across his cheek.

Hackberry got to his feet, off balance, the blood draining from his head, his hand still tingling from the recoil of the revolver. He pulled the cork from a whiskey bottle and drank, then pushed through the bat-wing doors, tilting the bottle skyward, while the few onlookers in the street backed away from him as they would from a half-formed creature born before the Creator made light.

HE DIDN’T COME home for two days. When he did, she was in the bedroom, packing her trunk. “Stop by to use our indoor plumbing?” she said without looking up.