“You will not do that. Don’t even pretend you plan to do that. I don’t want to shoot a woman.”
“You think I care about yo’ gun? I seen you before. Where’s your badge at? They take it away from you?”
“He’s a lawman?” the burned man said.
“Off the bed,” Hackberry said.
“I done warned you,” the woman said. She flung the contents of the bucket on him, in his face and eyes and hair, sloshing his skin and hat and coat and shirt with a ubiquitous stench that was like effluent from a sewage line or shrimp that had soured in a bait well. He gagged and tried to wipe it out of his eyes and mouth and ears, then saw the man reach under his pillow and get to his feet.
Hackberry pointed the Peacemaker straight out in front of him, cocking the hammer, believing that it was already too late, that a fat, half-dressed, enraged black woman against whom he had no grievance had just ripped the hands off his clock.
He pulled the trigger without aiming. The roar of the .45 inside the closed room was deafening. The bullet blew through the burned man’s shoulder and embedded in the wall and patterned the wallpaper with blood. But neither the burned man nor the enraged woman was through. The woman swung the bucket at Hackberry’s head just as the burned man aimed and pulled the trigger on a small semiautomatic. The firing pin snapped dryly on a bad cartridge; the man jerked the slide to clear the chamber and load a second round.
The bucket cut Hackberry above the eye. He fired again without aiming, the Peacemaker bucking in his palm, flame leaping from the muzzle. The burned man crashed backward as though trying to sit on the sill and unable to find purchase, taking the broken glass and the shade down with him, his mouth open like a starving bird’s.
Hackberry lowered the gun and stared at the destroyed window, his right hand shaking uncontrollably. Down below someone had turned on a light and was yelling for help. Hackberry hardly felt the blows when the black woman attacked him, trying to claw his eyes.
He shoved her away and leaned out the window, staring down into the circle of light where the dead man lay. A Mexican woman had rolled him over on his back and was holding his head in her lap. She looked up at Hackberry, blinking against the rain. He could see the hole in the burned man’s stomach and the blood welling out of it.
“You the man did this?” the woman said. “Why you hurt Eddy? Why you come down to do this? Help! Somebody help!”
THE SHERIFF’S SUBSTATION was located inside an ancient one-story brick building that smelled like stagnant water. It once served as the county jail and now contained two cells, neither of which had plumbing; they were used only to lock up drunks overnight.
Hackberry sat in a chair by a chain-locked gun rack lined with shotguns and Winchester lever-action rifles. The door to one cell was open, the other empty. The sheriff stood inside the open cell, looking down at a man in a plain oblong wood box; the dead man’s body had been sprinkled with chunks of blue ice that a deputy had carried in a bucket from the saloon next door. “His name was Eddy Diamond,” the sheriff said. “He did two years in Yuma for syndicalism.”
“‘Syndicalism’? Meaning what?”
“Stirring up union trouble in Arizona Territory. You all right?”
“I heard inmates go crazy in the cells at Yuma.”
“Most people do when you lock them in an iron box in hunnerd-and-twenty-degree heat.”
“How’d he get burned?”
“Some shit in the Philippines. Or Nicaragua. I forget which.” The sheriff came out of the cell and closed the door behind him, shaking it to make sure it had clicked shut.
“You’re sure his name was Diamond?”
“It was the only one he used.”
“Did he have an alias? Like Jimmy Belloc or Jimmy No Lines?”
“Not to my knowledge.” The sheriff had a drooping mustache and a lined face and a purple bump on the ridge of his nose. He had gotten out of bed to take care of the shooting and kept looking at the clock on the desk. “Don’t study on this, Hack. You didn’t have no choice.”
“I got his name from Mealy Lonetree. I think he was the one who threw acid at Beatrice DeMolay.”
&nb
sp; “That’s one woman I wish would move to Mars.”
“That man in yonder is the one who attacked her. It had to be him.”
“Diamond was in jail for disturbing the peace the night she says somebody threw acid at her.”
“She says?”
“You in the habit of believing ex-whores?”