4

“You know how it goes,” Hill says, and sits back in his chair. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be all that surprised. You’ve dodged the bullet for quite a while, haven’t you?”

His face swells with glee. I imagine if I punch him right now, which is exactly what every cell in my body is telling me to do, his head would pop like a balloon. But no matter how satisfying that might be it won’t change the fact that tonight my number’s come up. I get to drive. Hill, son of a bitch that he is, is still only a messenger, a courier boy. Putting a hurting on him wouldn’t make a difference.

Cobb speaks up, “Hell, Tom, I’ll drive for you. It’d keep me out of the rain. Besides, I told ‘ol Blue Moon I’d take him up a bottle of somethin’. Kill two birds with one stone, right?” His nervous grin is flashed for everyone’s approval, but he doesn’t get it. No one even looks at him, except me, and though I don’t say it, I’m grateful. I know Cobb walks around in the nip for one reason only–he wants to be noticed, remembered for something other than his gift, or maybe he does it to draw attention away from it. A hey look everybody! Underneath my clothes I’m just the same as you! kind of gesture. It doesn’t work, and I guess, like the rest of us, he’s tired of trying, tired of waiting here every Saturday night to find out if he’s going to have to murder someone else. Considering what he can do, and what he’s had to do in the past, it’s got to be tougher on him than most of us. Like being God and the Devil’s ping-pong ball. I also know, even if the Reverend allowed it, Cobb wouldn’t follow the rules tonight. Chances are, he’d drive my battered old truck right off the Willow Creek Bridge, be smiling while he drowned and poor old Blue Moon Running Bear would have to go without his whiskey for a little while longer.

“Very noble of you,” Hill says, sounding bored. “But this isn’t a shift at the sawmill. There’s no trading.” He looks Cobb up and down. “But don’t worry. You’ll get your turn. You get that car yet?”

“Wife doesn’t let me drive it. Not here. Not when I’ll be drinkin’.”

“Then either lie or quit drinking. But get it.”

“All right.”

Cobb offers me a sympathetic glance. I wave it away and look hard at the priest. “Who is it?”

From the breast pocket of his jacket, he produces a pack of Sonoma Lights. “Anyone got a light?”

When no one obliges, Gracie tosses him a box of matches, which he grabs from the air without looking–an impressive trick that leaves me wishing like hell he’d fumbled it. He lights his cigarette and squints at me through a plume of blue smoke. “You want the name?”

“No. I’d like to keep what little sleep I get at night. Unless you want to take that too.”

“Oh now, would you listen to this? You make it sound as if you’re the victim!” He barks a laugh and swivels in his chair to face the bar. “Is that what all of you think? That I’m the bad guy, come to destroy your lives?” He turns again, addressing Cadaver and the kid this time. “That you’re all just innocents, forced to do the bidding of some wicked higher power?” He shakes his head in amazement. “Don’t fool yourselves folks. Until I came along you were hanging in Purgatory, waiting for a decision to be made either way. You should be thanking me that you’re not all roasting in the fires of Hell.”

“So that’s not what this is then?”

He leans close, eyes dark, twin threads of blue smoke trailing from his wide nostrils. “Not even close, Deputy Dawg.”

We stare at each other over the table. I try to will the kid to take his shot. I don’t even care who he hits. But the kid isn’t moving, just watching, just like everyone else. The rain keeps raining and the thunder keeps thundering, but inside Eddie’s there isn’t a sound, until I speak.

“This will end, you know.” It’s a threat that has no weight behind it. I want this to be over; I want things to be the way they were before my wife died, before the kid got it into his head that my skull would look better spread across the wall; before we all ended up here as slaves to our sins, but it’s too late. There’s no turning back now. Things have gone too far. Hill knows this, knows surer than shit that all of us are going to be here next Saturday night and the Saturday night after that, and the one after that until we’ve paid off whatever debt it is he’s decided–or more accurately, whoever controls him has decided–we owe.

But tonight isn’t going to be that night, and as blue light fills the cracks in the rundown bar, I reach across and slide the keys toward me.

“I know it will end,” the Reverend answers, and pauses to take a deep drag on his cigarette. “Tonight it ends for you.”

I close my fist around the keys and let them bite into my palm.

“You get a thief and his girlfriend,” he continues. “The guy shot a pump jockey in the face, killed a woman and injured a little kid. The girlfriend’s an addict and a whore. No one will miss them.”

“Someone will. Someone always does.”

The priest sits back again and smiles. “That’s not for us to worry about.”

“Not for you maybe.”

“These missives from your goody-goody conscience are getting to be a real bore, Tom.”

“This, from a priest.”

His smile fades. “You’d best get moving, Sheriff. Your people need you.”

I throw back what’s left of the whiskey, then grab the bottle to keep me company. Hill won’t object–he likes us good and drunk–and though Gracie might be pissed that she’s out a few dollars, she won’t say anything either. She understands the nature of dirty work.

I stand and jingle the keys in my palm. “When this is over,” I tell him. “You’re the only one going to Hell.”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he slides my glass in front of him and puts his own thumb over the print. It fits perfectly. He chuckles and turns his chair around so he’s facing the bar. Flo avoids his gaze and slips her hand over Wintry’s. Everyone goes back to doing a real bad job of pretending nothing’s amiss.

At my back, Cobb grumbles on.

The few steps to the front door feel like a condemned man’s walk to the electric chair, the lightning through the windows only adding to the effect.

As I reach the door and grab the brass handle, the lightning reveals the skeletal profile hunkered nearby, the shadows of the coin towers like knives jabbing at his chest. He’s looking out the window, darkness pooling in the hollows of his eyes as, in what passes for a whisper, he says, “Someone’s comin’.” Then I hear it. Hurried footsteps, confused shuffling, and I move back just in time to avoid getting my face mashed in by a hunk of weathered oak as the door bursts open almost hard enough to knock it off its hinges. Rain, wind and shadows fill the doorway. Without knowing, or caring who it is that’s standing on the threshold, I lunge forward, plant my hand in the middle of the figure’s chest and shove them back out into the storm. “Get the hell out of here,” I tell them, in as hard a voice as I can muster under the circumstances. Hill would love this, more recruits for his twisted game.

But whoever it is I’ve just tried to dissuade, grunts, pivots on a heel, slams back against the door for balance and reaches out an arm toward where I’m standing, ready for anything.

Anything but the gun that’s suddenly thrust in my face, the steel barrel dripping rainwater. “Get the fuck back inside,” a man’s voice says, and then a woman stumbles forth from the darkness and collapses on the floor. The rain that drips from her sodden form is pink. She’s bleeding somewhere but right now all my attention is focused on the black eye of the gun that’s three inches from my nose.

“Flo, Gracie…someone help the lady,” I call out.

“Don’t you touch her,” the man says. I wish I could see his face, but so far he’s only a voice and a pale sleeve with a Colt .45 at the end of it.

I’m getting real tired of having guns pointed at me.

***

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