The Man Who Hated Ned O'Leary (Dig Two Graves 2)

He tried to keep his gaze high to avoid provoking the folk of Beaver Springs into hurling yet more items his way, but they were also of no interest to him. They were simple people—hard-working and blinded by their belief in community and the innate goodness everyone had in them before their heart went to rot. It was easier to point fingers and judge than consider the simple fact that Christian duty ended where hunger began. But Cole wouldn’t try to whiten his name. What was the point? By this time tomorrow, it would be as if he’d never existed.

The good folk of Beaver Springs followed the cart, shouting insults, but many already waited at the gallows, close to the entryway into town, their cheeks rosy from the excitement of violence they could so easily wash their hands of. In fifteen minutes, they’d leave with their precious consciences pristine as ever.

Most weren’t even here for him, since to them he was a new face, ‘some murderer’, as he heard one man tell another. Their anger and curiosity focused on the Wolfman, Ned O’Leary, who had once been a local.

“Heard his mother hung herself once she found out he was a criminal,” said one woman in a high-pitched voice.

“No, she died years ago, when he was still a boy. They came back from the mountains changed. Heard his father kept wolves as pets and hunted with them.”

Cole snorted at the ridiculousness of all the gossip, but once Rory aligned the cart with the gallows, his stomach dropped as if he were about to fall into the abyss.

Which he was.

When the sheriff stood on the wooden platform, and his gaze settled on his two prisoners, Cole needed to follow his lead with his chin raised.

But he found himself struggling to do so, as if every movement he made pumped his stomach full of rancid oil that was about to rise in his throat. Fear he’d so far denied, climbed from the depths of his body and calcified his muscles. In the past few years, death had occupied his mind so frequently he’d made himself believe that he’d become indifferent to it. But now that he was about to face it for real, the things he hadn’t yet done flashed through his mind like moving pictures. He still enjoyed seeing new places, taking photographs, and the simple pleasures of good food and sunshine. The fact that he’d survived what Ned had done to him made him want to live against the odds.

Ned climbed onto the gallows first. Despite the gruesome nature of what was about to unravel, they’d both got their dried clothes back for the hanging so that everyone’s modesty remained intact. A strange concept. If you were willing to watch a man die, you shouldn’t have qualms about any other aspects of his physicality.

Cole hesitated, his stomach squeezed so tightly it might solidify in this cramped form, but then Ned looked back at him, and courage once again flowed in his veins, helping him climb onto the platform with Rory’s assistance.

He might’ve hated Ned O’Leary, but this man knew him, and at least in their final moments, neither of them would be alone. Ned gave a single nod when Rory wordlessly asked him if he wanted his head covered. While the sheriff spoke to the townsfolk, Rory put a jute sack over Ned’s head and brought over the noose with a somber expression.

Cole couldn’t focus on what the sheriff was saying, his attention drawn to the way Ned’s fingers twitched behind his back. They were going pale from the rope digging into flesh too tightly.

“You?”

Cole blinked, staring back at Rory, who held up the sack with a question in his eyes, but Cole shook his head and joined Ned on the trapdoor, which creaked the moment he put his weight on it, dipping ever so slightly. If he was to die, he’d do so with eyes wide open, staring into the sky that was about to open high above and cry for his soul. Perhaps he’d get to catch a final drop on his tongue.

The people gathered to witness his death meant nothing, their voices like the roar of a waterfall—loud yet insignificant, so he focused on the trees dotting the edge of the ravine and tried to smell them through the insistent odors of human activity. When Rory slung the noose on him, it fell to his collarbones, heavy as if it were made of steel, but he kept his shoulders straight even as it tightened to hug his neck in preparation for that final squeeze.

Next to him, Ned already had his strapped properly, and the jute covering his features kept moving back and forth, sucked in and pushed out by frantic breathing, as if he were choking already. Cole’s blood boiled with the need to see his face one last time, and as Cole stared at the fabric, he imagined that Ned was looking back at him. That he also wished they’d been put in a single cell after all. That they’d taken the time to talk things through, since it would change nothing at this point.