She lurched forward, snarling her indignance at the needlessly brusque firebrand, and stopped. Her mouth opened suddenly, lines spoking her eyes, but she managed to stifle the gasp that had started deep in her throat, when her eyes had settled on the cadaver sitting before Bill Thornton’s massive, scarred desk fronting a curtained window in the opposite wall.
But it wasn’t a cadaver sitting there, leaning back in Thornton’s brocade swivel chair. No. Arms crossed on his concave chest, spindly legs raised, slippered feet crossed on the desktop, it was Thornton himself. The roadhouse manager wore a tattered, faded red and white plaid robe—one that Faith remembered—and longhandle underwear begrimed with many stains and spotted with cigar burns.
But what captured the brunt of Faith’s attention was the man’s bulbous head—the skin of his face drawn paper white between his cheekbones and his jaw, the hollows so deep that she could see his jaw hinges. His eyes were sunken deep in overlarge sockets. His hair, which she’d remembered as thin and light brown, was now little more than a few insubstantial strands nearly as pasty gray as his face.
His long neck seemed to be constructed solely of sinew amongst which his Adam’s apple hung like a large gray spider caught in the web of some giant fly.
Thornton stared at Faith dully, the rheumy gaze registering only faint recognition. As he kept his eyes on her, his thin pink lips opened, and he puffed a fat cigar for a time before barking through a thick cloud of wafting smoke, “Leave us, Temple.”
“Ain’t you forgetting something?”
Thornton’s voice was raspy and higher than she remembered. “Your money’s downstairs at the bottom of the wood box. Help yourself to hooch, but there ain’t much for food.”
“We’ll get by. We ain’t stayin’ long, anyways.” Temple glanced at Faith as he turned slowly, haltingly to the door. He stopped, glanced back at Thornton. “You sure you can handle this polecat? I think she outweighs you, Thornton.”
“Leave us!” Thornton barked, louder.
“All right, all right.” Temple ran his appreciative gaze over Faith once more. Though he was grinning, he seemed reluctant to leave. Finally, he noddedat her briefly, pulled his gaze away, sauntered out the door, and drew it closed behind him.
Faith stared across the room at the little, gray-headed scarecrow leaning back behind his desk. Thornton met her gaze, holding it pensively as he puffed the cigar. Behind him, the light was fading, which seemed to intensify the light from the green and mauve Tiffany lamp on the desk to his right. The light burnished the smoke cloud billowing around his head.
Behind the rich smell of the tobacco and the coal-oil lamp lay the cloying odor of rotting flesh.
Thornton’s chest rose suddenly. “How you been, Faith?”
She stood still as wax, her face expressionless. “Do what you’re gonna do, you pathetic bastard. And get it over with.”
Thornton smiled a death’s-head smile as he rolled the wet tip of his cigar around on his lower lip. He canted his head sideways, as if indicating someone else in the room. “Did the boys have their way with you?”
Faith laughed suddenly, loudly at the irony. The possibility of her having been sullied by her captors was no doubt of far more interest to Thornton, a common roadhouse pimp, than it was to Yakima, her own man.
“No,” she said, feeling her jaws tense as her eyes burned a hole through the devil before her. “I enjoyed
them
”—she smiled wickedly—“every chance I
got
.”
Thornton’s lips stretched across his face like a knife slash, and he tipped his head back on his shoulders, guffawing. The laughter dwindled into rattling coughs, and he looked at Faith again through the smoke, his eyes wet. “I always loved your salty sense of humor. Such language seemed so out of place on such a pretty mouth. It’s downright—what is it? Erotic.”
Thornton gestured toward the orange-cushioned settee against the wall to Faith’s right. “Why don’t you take off your coat and sit down, so we can catch up?”
“Diddle yourself, you son of a bitch. You killed my brother and burned our cabin—Yakima’s and mine. You ruined our lives. I’ve got no ‘catching up’ to do with you.”
She moved forward, balling her fists at her sides, her blue eyes flashing like bits of polished glass. “I’m not gonna sit down so you can groom me for the killin’—try to put me at ease so the sudden knife slash will be all that more of a surprise. I gut-shot you and ran out on you, and you’ve obviously been stewin’ over it for the past two years.” She shook her head. “Well, your stewin’s about to be over. Get up and face me like a man, you pathetic son of a bitch!”
Thornton’s face had become a blank death mask once more, void of expression. Suddenly, he leaned back, opened the top desk drawer, and hauled out a silver-plated .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver—the one he’d always kept in his desk to deal with customers who’d tried to skin out on their bill, or double-crossing business partners such as freighters who’d tried to charge him too much for a whiskey haul.
For wayward whores he usually reserved his obsidian-handled, seven-inch stiletto. Two quick horizontal slashes across the lips, to brand them and ruin them for the only trade they had. Reducing them to animals so that, thrown back into the wild to which they were no longer accustomed, they’d soon starve or fall victim to the elements.
It was the S&W he clutched now, pointing the barrel at Faith as he heaved himself up out of the chair, red faced and sweating and reeking like a dead animal. As he moved out from behind the desk, he clutched his right side, just above his waist, wincing as though every movement pained him. His robe winged open slightly, and Faith saw a bloody bandage.
“Christ,” she said, awestruck as she slid her eyes up from Thornton’s side to his oily face growing before her.
“Yeah, Christ!” The roadhouse manager leaned down to snatch up a piece of split, stove-length wood that had been leaning against his desk. “That’s your doin’, bitch!”
Faith couldn’t conceal her surprise. “That’s where I shot you?”
Thornton straightened and continued moving toward her, the pistol in his right hand, the wood in his left. The wood was splattered with dried dark red blood. He spat his words out like phlegm-laced marbles, slitting his bulging eyes.
“Must’ve been a poisoned bullet you shot me with. What are you—a witch?”
Faith said nothing. She found herself backing toward the door.
She thought she’d prepared herself for the worst, but there’d been no way she could have prepared herself for the demonic ogre stumbling toward her now, wielding a pistol in one hand, a chunk of bloodstained wood in the other. His death smell made her eyes water.
It was the smell of a cave in which a wild beast had curled up and died.
Horror and revulsion nearly unhinged her. Stumbling backward, she backed into the wall. Thornton moved toward her, blowing his sour breath and raising the revolver, narrowing one eye as he cocked the hammer with a raspy click.
“The half-breed dead, is he?”
“Maybe.” Faith stared at the gun muzzle yawning before her, and her resignation returned. She shaped an icy smile as she tipped her chin toward the window. “Maybe he’s right out there.”
“Follow you, did he?” Thornton slitted a rheumy eye and nodded. “Once a whoremonger, always a whoremonger.”
“You should know, Bill.”
Pressing the revolver to her forehead, he dropped the wood and reached toward her with his left hand, grabbed the collar of her coat, and jerked down. “Get out of them duds, whore! I’m gonna beat you naked!”
Thornton had more strength than he appeared to have. The coat’s first two buttons gave, and Faith stumbled forward, knees bending. “No!”
“Out of them duds!” Thornton ordered again, giving the coat another tug while aiming the gun at Faith’s head.
Buttons clattered to the floor and rolled while Faith, falling to her knees, tried to hold the coat closed against her chest. The coat opened, and as Thornton laughed mirthlessly and grabbed her shirt, Faith bounded up off her heels.
She nudged his gun aside and rammed her left fist, knuckles first, into Thornton’s right side. She could feel the soggy blood and puss and the bandage padding the wound before she withdrew her fist and glanced at Thornton.
The eyes seem to pop out of the roadhouse manager’s head, and, his face turning a shader pale of gray, he threw his head back on his shoulders and yelled like a trapped grizzly. Stumbling back and falling to one knee, he dropped the revolver and kicked it.
The gun spun past Faith toward the settee to her right.
“Ach! Goddamn . . . son of a bitch!” Thornton raged as Faith dove for the gun.
She hit the floor on her shoulder and slid across the puncheons, piling up against the settee and closing her hands over the gun. On one knee, Thornton turned toward her, his face a mask of pain and fury.
“Bitch!”
Thornton looked down, saw the bloodstained log. He grabbed it in his right hand and pushed back to his feet. Wanting a good shot at the man, Faith gained her knees, then raised the revolver in both hands. He bolted toward her, faster than she’d thought possible. She’d just got the hammer cocked back before he was three feet away from her, swinging the log from back behind his shoulder, lips stretched back from his yellow teeth and purple gums.
Squinting one eye and holding her ground, Faith drew a bead on Thornton’s forehead. Thornton was swinging the club forward when Faith squeezed the trigger.
The hammer pinged on a spent chamber.
Shocked, Faith glanced at the gun. Seeing the wood slamming toward her, she ducked slightly, turning sideways. It wasn’t enough of a move to avoid the blow altogether, and a corner of the sharp-edged log caught her right temple with a resolute smack, dimming her vision and making her ears ring as she rose off her feet and flew sideways to pile up hard at the base of Thornton’s desk.
Thornton threw his head back and shouted hoarsely toward the wainscoted ceiling, “Evil, wicked, double-crossing
bitch
!”
As he moved toward her, wobbling and stumbling over his own slippered feet, Faith, lying against the desk, blinked to clear her blurred vision. She brushed the back of her right hand against her left temple. The knuckles came away coated in blood.
Behind a strange tingling, she felt a throbbing inside her temple, just above her ringing right ear.
Heavily, still trying to clear her eyes, Faith scrambled to her feet. Thornton hauled the club back again for another blow. Faith threw her left arm up in front of her head. The club slammed into it, lifting her up off the floor and throwing her onto the desk.
She screamed as she rolled across the desk, sweeping a pen holder, ashtray, books, and the Tiffany lamp onto the floor with raucous clattering thumps and the scream of breaking glass. As she flew over the swivel chair and hit the floor behind it, grunting loudly as the air was hammered from her lungs, she heard a fiery whoosh and smelled the sharp, piney smell of coal oil.
In the periphery of her vision, she saw flames dancing up the curtains behind her. Both her ears were ringing now and she felt a tingling in her limbs. Rage and terror took over, and she scrambled back to her feet, feeling the heat from the flames pushing against her.
As the flames coiled up the curtains and the wall behind the desk, lighting the room bizarrely and sending smoke tendrils angling toward the ceiling, Faith bounded out from behind the desk. Thornton stepped between her and the door, blood showing thickly on his robe and stretching across his pot-belly.