House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“That old revolver is the least of your problems,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“You trespass on my property, you lie to my face, you disturb my meal, and now you treat my possessions with contempt. You boys really piss me off. I hate stupid people. It’s a character defect I have never overcome. I work on it and work on it, and then a pair like you comes along and all my efforts go down the drain.” Hackberry’s face pained as he got to his feet, his joints creaking.

“You better close your mouth,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“That’s what I mean. Stupid to the core,” Hackberry said. “Your mother must have been impregnated by a yeast infection.”

He fitted his hand around the wood handle on the iron rod and rammed the heated tip into the scrotum of the man with the lazy eye, then swung it across the face of his partner. The man with the lazy eye dropped his shotgun and grabbed his genitalia, his mouth wide open, as though his jawbone were broken. Hackberry hit the other man again, splitting open his forehead, knocking him into the cave wall. He picked up the weapons of both men and flung them end over end into the river.

“Who paid you?” he said.

“Nobody,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“This running iron I’m holding is of historical importance,” Hackberry said. He held the tip of the iron over the fire. “I took it off the man who figured out how to change the XIT brand into a star with a cross inside it. The owners of the XIT let him off for showing them how he did it. I can show you how to do it, too. On your back or on your chest.”

“Then do it, you nasty old crock,” said the man with the lazy eye.

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

The man with the lazy eye blanched, his jaw tightening.

“That’s not what I mean,” Hackberry said. “I’m glad to see you’re not totally worthless. Here’s the reality of our situation. If you torture a man, he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, including the victim’s. Besides, it’s not something I do. So that’s it. Adiós.”

“What?” said the man with the split forehead.

“Git. Don’t come back. Next time out, I’ll hurt you.”

The man with the split head had pressed his hand to his wound and was staring at the bloody star on his palm. “What the hell you call this?”

“Practice,” Hackberry said.

He gathered up his revolver and holster and belt and sat back down in his chair, blowing out his breath, trying to catch a glimpse of the sky beyond the cave’s entrance. Then he set his stationery box on his lap and began to address an envelope to Ishmael. In seconds he was deep in thought about Ishmael. When he glanced up again, his visitors were gone.

THE HOSPITAL OUTSIDE Denver had been converted from a nineteenth-century army fort whose two-story buildings had the wide porches and stucco walls and red Spanish-tile roofs of army forts all over the burgeoning New American Empire. Ishmael had been placed in a ward with eight other officers, then moved to a private room, one that had a radiator and a private bathroom and a lovely view of the shade trees on the grounds and, in the distance, mountains whose peaks gusted with snow in the sunset.

“Why the special treatment?” Ishmael asked the orderly.

“You probably have friends in high places.”

“Must be a mistake,” Ishmael said.

“You need anything, Captain?”

“I didn’t sleep much last night. Could you give me a touch of something, nothing too strong?”

“Better talk to the doc.”

“I don’t want to bother him. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

He hadn’t lied. He seldom slept through the night without dreaming, and as the French colonel had warned him, his dreams were not good ones. Neither were they nightmares, at least not in the ordinary sense. They were not filled with gargoyles and improbable events; they were simply a replay of events he had witnessed or images he had seen. Maybe that was what made the dreams so disturbing: They weren’t creations of the mind; they were an accurate replication of the world. The bigger problem was he couldn’t shut them down, as he did during his waking hours. Also the images told a story that few wanted to hear and that he did not wish to impose upon others.

Some German infantry units were issued a bayonet that had sawteeth along the crest of the blade. When it was extracted from the victim, particularly when the entry wound was in the upper torso, the sawteeth ripped loose bone, cartilage, lungs, kidneys, liver, and entrails like viscera in a slaughterhouse. One way or another, the French sent a message to the Germans: Any soldier captured with a sawtooth bayonet not filed flat on the spine would suffer a fate that no civilized person would ever want to hear about. To Ishmael, the stories had seemed apocryphal, not unlike the accounts of women chained to machine guns or bottles of German schnapps laced with cyanide left in trenches for French soldiers to find. Anyway, why was dying on a sawtooth bayonet more inhumane than death by a flamethrower or mustard gas that boiled the eyes in their sockets and coated the inside of the lungs with blisters and pustules?

Ishmael and his men had gone over the top through six hundred yards of machine-gun fire and artillery rounds loaded with gas, the air so thick with smoke and dust that the sun had turned to an orange wafer, metal flying through the air with a dry spitting sound like someone blowing abruptly through a peashooter. Men were cru