The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Read online

  “I don’t know what lives down in those caves. I don’t want to know. Martians or government agents or Nazis from the earth’s core, it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that no one from Amigo is going to end up down there.”

  Wes honked again. I knew it was time to go. I got up. Really, there was no reason to hang around. The whole thing was out of my hands now that the white Mexican was chained to the concrete block.

  He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t say a word. He just stared at the mouth of the cave, and he kept his mouth shut.

  That was fine with me.

  “Folks from Amigo, we’re safe out here,” I said.

  I turned my back on the Mexican.

  “We have been for a long time.”

  I opened the door to Wes’ van.

  “We want to keep it that way.”

  That was when I heard him move behind me. The chain played out, but he couldn’t get far.

  He took a breath. “Don’t leave me here,” he said. “For the love of God… please… ”

  His voice was very small. In a high wind, you’d hardly notice it.

  I stood there for a minute, listening to him beg, but I wasn’t going to turn around. If I didn’t do that, it would be just like I was listening to nobody.

  If I didn’t turn around, there was no white Mexican behind me.

  No white Mexican at all.

  DO NOT HASTEN TO BID ME ADIEU

  ONE

  He was done up all mysterious-like–black bandanna covering half his face, black duster, black boots and hat. Traveling incognito, just like that coachman who picked up Harker at the Borgo Pass.

  Yeah. As a red man might figure it, that was many moons ago… at the beginning of the story. Stoker’s story, anyway. But that tale of mannered woe and stiff-upper-lip bravado was as crazy as the lies Texans told about Crockett and his Alamo bunch. Harker didn’t exist. Leastways, the man in black had never met him.

  Nobody argued sweet-told lies, though. Nobody in England, anyhow. Especially with Stoker tying things up so neat and proper, and the count gone to dust and dirt and all.

  A grin wrinkled the masked man’s face as he remembered the vampire crumbling to nothing finger-snap quick, like the remnants of a cow-flop campfire worried by an unbridled prairie wind. Son of a bitch must have been mucho old. Count Dracula had departed this vale of tears, gone off to suckle the devil’s own tit… though the man in black doubted that Dracula’s scientific turn of mind would allow him to believe in Old Scratch.

  You could slice it fine or thick–ultimately, the fate of Count Dracula didn’t make no nevermind. The man in black was one hell of a long way from Whitby, and his dealings with the count seemed about as unreal as Stoker’s scribblings. Leastways, that business was behind him. This was to be his story. And he was just about to slap the ribbons to it.

  Slap the ribbons he did, and the horses picked up the pace. The wagon bucked over ruts, creaking like an arthritic dinosaur. Big black box jostling in the back. Tired horses sweating steam up front. West Texas sky a quilt for the night, patched blood red and bruise purple and shot through with blue-pink streaks, same color as the meat that lines a woman’s heart.

  And black. Thick black squares in that quilt, too. More coming every second. Awful soon, there’d be nothing but those black squares and a round white moon.

  Not yet, though. The man could still see the faint outline of a town on the horizon. There was Morrisville, up ahead, waiting in the red and purple and blue-pink shadows.

  He wondered what she’d make of Morrisville. It was about as far from the stone manors of Whitby as one could possibly get. No vine-covered mysteries here. No cool salt breezes whispering from the green sea, blanketing emerald lawns, traveling lush garden paths. Not much of anything green at all. No crumbling Carfax estate, either. And no swirling fog to mask the night–everything right out in the open, just as plain as the nose on your face. A West Texas shit-splat. Cattle business, mostly. A matchstick kind of town. Wooden buildings–wind-dried, sun-bleached–that weren’t much more than tinder dreading the match.

  The people who lived there were the same way.

  But it wasn’t the town that made this place. He’d told her that. It was that big blanket of a sky, an eternal wave threatening to break over the dead dry husk of the prairie, fading darker with each turn of the wagon wheels–cresting, cresting–ready to smother the earth like a hungry thing.

  Not a bigger, blacker night anywhere on the planet. When that nightwave broke, as it did all too rarely–wide and mean and full-up with mad lightning and thunder–it was something to see.

  He’d promised her that. He’d promised to show her the heart of a wild Texas night, the way she’d shown him the shadows of Whitby.

  Not that he always kept his promises. But this one was a promise to himself as much as it was a promise to her.

  He’d hidden from it for a while. Sure. In the wake of all that horror, he’d run. But finally he’d returned to Whitby, and to her. He’d returned to keep his promise.

  And now he was coming home.

  “Not another place like it anywhere, Miss Lucy. Damn sure not on this side of the pond, anyhow.”

  She didn’t fake a blush or get all offended by his language, like so many of the English missies did, and he liked that. She played right with him, like she knew the game. Not just knew it, but thrived on it. “No,” she said. “Nothing here could possibly resemble your Texas, Quincey P. Morris. Because no one here resembles you.”

  She took him by the lapels and kissed him like she was so hungry for it, like she couldn’t wait another moment, and then he had her in his arms and they were moving together, off the terrace, away from the house and the party and the dry rattle of polite conversation. He was pulling her and she was pushing him and together they were going back, back into the shadows of Whitby, deep into the garden where fog settled like velvet and the air carried what for him would always be the green scent of England.

  And then they were alone. The party sounds were a world away. But those sounds were nothing worth hearing–they were dead sounds compared to the music secret lovers could make. Matched with the rustle of her skirts, and the whisper of his fingers on her tender thighs, and the sweet duet of hungry lips, the sounds locked up in the big stone house were as sad and empty as the cries of the damned souls in Dr. Seward’s loony bin, and he drew her away from them, and she pushed him away from them, and together they entered another world where strange shadows met, cloaking them like fringed buckskin, like gathered satin.

  Buckskin and satin. It wasn’t what you’d call a likely match. They’d been dancing around it for months. But now the dancing was over.

  “God, I want you,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything. There was really nothing more to say.

  She gave. She took. And he did the same.

  He reined in the horses just short of town. Everything was black but that one circle of white hanging high in the sky.

  He stepped down from the driver’s box and stretched. He drew the night air deep into his lungs. The air was dry and dusty, and there wasn’t anything in it that was pleasant.

  He was tired. He lay down on top of the big black box in the back of the wagon and thought of her. His fingers traveled wood warped in the leaky cargo hold of a British ship. Splinters fought his callused hands, lost the battle. But he lost the war, because the dissonant rasp of rough fingers on warped wood was nothing like the music the same rough fingers could make when exploring a young woman’s thighs.

  He didn’t give up easy, though. He searched for the memory of the green scent of England, and the music he’d made there, and shadows of satin and buckskin. He searched for the perfume of her hair, and her skin. The ready, eager perfume of her sex.

  His hands traveled the wood. Scurrying like scorpions. Damn things just wouldn’t give up, and he couldn’t help laughing.

  Raindrops beaded on the box. The nightwave was breaking.

&n
bsp; No. Not raindrops at all. Only his tears.

  The sky was empty. No clouds. No rain.

  No lightning.

  But there was lightning in his eyes.

  TWO

  The morning sunlight couldn’t penetrate the filthy jailhouse window. That didn’t bother the man in black. He had grown to appreciate the darkness.

  Sheriff Josh Muller scratched his head. “This is the damnedest thing, Quincey. You got to admit that that Stoker fella made it pretty plain in his book.”

  Quincey smiled. “You believe the lies that Buntline wrote about Buffalo Bill, too?”

  “Shit no, Quince. But, hell, that Stoker is an Englishman. I thought they was different and all–”

  “I used to think that. Until I got to know a few of the bastards, that is.”

  “Well,” the sheriff said, “that may be… but the way it was, was… we all thought that you had been killed by them Transylvanian gypsies, like you was in the book.”

  “I’ve been some places, before and since. But we never got to Transylvania. Not one of us. And I ain’t even feelin’ poorly.”

  “But in the book–”

  “Just how stupid are you, Josh? You believe in vampires, too? Your bowels get loose thinkin’ about Count Dracula?”

  “Hell, no, of course not, but–”

  “Shit, Josh, I didn’t mean that like a question you were supposed to answer.”

  “Huh?”

  Quincey sighed. “Let’s toss this on the fire and watch it sizzle. It’s real simple–I ain’t dead. I’m back. Things are gonna be just like they used to be. We can start with this here window.”

  Quincey Morris shot a thumb over his shoulder. The sheriff looked up and saw how dirty the window was. He grabbed a rag from his desk. “I’ll take care of it, Quince.”

  “You don’t get it,” the man in black said.

  “Huh?”

  Again, Quincey sighed. “I ain’t dead. I’m back. Things are gonna be just like they used to be. And this is Morrisville, right?”

  The sheriff squinted at the words painted on the window. He wasn’t a particularly fast reader–he’d been four months reading the Stoker book, and that was with his son doing most of the reading out loud. On top of that, he had to read this backwards. He started in, reading right to left: O-W-E-N-S-V-I-L-L…

  That was as far as he got. Quincey Morris picked up a chair and sent it flying through the glass, and then the word wasn’t there anymore.

  Morris stepped through the opening and started toward his wagon. He stopped in the street, which was like a river of sunlight, turned, and squinted at the sheriff. “Get that window fixed,” he said. “Before I come back.”

  “Where are you headed?” The words were out of Josh Muller’s mouth before he could stop himself, and he flinched at the grin Morris gave him in return.

  “I’m goin’ home,” was all he said.

  There in the shadows, none of it mattered, because it was only the two of them. Two creatures from different worlds, but with hearts that were the same.

  He’d come one hell of a long way to find this. Searched the world over. He’d known that he’d find it, once he went looking, same as he’d known that it was something he had to go out and find if he wanted to keep on living. His gut told him, Find it, or put a bullet in your brainpan. But he hadn’t known it would feel like this. It never had before. But this time, with this person… she filled him up like no one else. And he figured it was the same with her.

  “I want you.”

  “I think you just had me, Mr. Morris.”

  Her laughter tickled his neck, warm breath washing a cool patch traced by her tongue, drawn by her lips. Just a bruise, but as sure and real as a brand. He belonged to her. He knew that. But he didn’t know–

  The words slipped out before he could think them through. “I want you, forever.”

  That about said it, all right.

  He felt her shiver, and then her lips found his.

  “Forever is a long time,” she said.

  They laughed about that, embracing in the shadows.

  They actually laughed.

  She came running out of the big house as soon as he turned in from the road. Seeing her, he didn’t feel a thing. That made him happy, because in England, in the midst of everything else, he’d thought about her a lot. He’d wondered just what kind of fuel made her belly burn, and why she wasn’t more honest about it, in the way of the count. He wondered why she’d never gone ahead and torn open his jugular, the way a vampire would, because she sure as hell had torn open his heart.

  Leonora ran through the blowing dust, her hair a blond tangle, and she was up on the driver’s box sitting next to him before he could slow the horses–her arms around him, her lips on his cheek, her little flute of a voice all happy. “Quince! Oh, Quince! It is you! We thought you were dead!”

  He shook his head. His eyes were on the big house. It hadn’t changed. Not in the looks department, anyway. The occupants… now that was a different story.

  “Miss me?” he asked, and his tone of voice was not a pleasant thing.

  “I’m sorry.” She said it like she’d done something silly, like maybe she’d spilled some salt at the supper table or something. “I’m glad you came back.” She hugged him. “It’ll be different now. We’ve both had a chance to grow up.”

  He chuckled at that one, and she got it crossed up. “Oh, Quince, we’ll work it out… you’ll see. We both made mistakes. But it’s not too late to straighten them out.” She leaned over and kissed his neck, her tongue working between her lips.

  Quincey flushed with anger and embarrassment. The bitch. And with the box right there, behind them, in plain view. With him dressed head to toe in black. God, Leonora had the perceptive abilities of a blind armadillo.

  He shoved her, hard. She tumbled off the driver’s box. Her skirts caught on the seat, tearing as she fell. She landed in the dirt, petticoats bunched up around her waist.

  She cussed him real good. But he didn’t hear her at all, because suddenly he could see everything so clearly. The golden wedding band on her finger didn’t mean much. Not to her it didn’t, so it didn’t mean anything to him. But the fist-sized bruises on her legs did.

  He’d seen enough. He’d drawn a couple conclusions. Hal Owens hadn’t changed. Looking at those bruises, that was for damn sure. And it was misery that filled up Leonora’s belly–that had to be the answer which had eluded him for so long–and at present it seemed that she was having to make do with her own. Knowing Leonora as he did, he figured that she was probably about ready for a change of menu, and he wanted to make it real clear that he wasn’t going to be the next course.

  “You bastard!” she yelled. “You’re finished around here! You can’t just come walkin’ back into town, big as you please! This ain’t Morrisville, anymore, Quincey! It’s Owensville! And Hal’s gonna kill you! I’m his wife, dammit! And when I tell him what you did to me, he’s gonna flat-out kill you!” She scooped up fistfuls of dirt, threw them at him. “You don’t belong here anymore, you bastard!”

  She was right about that. He didn’t belong here anymore. This wasn’t his world. His world was contained in a big black box. That was the only place for him anymore. Anywhere else there was only trouble.

  Didn’t matter where he went these days, folks were always threatening him.

  Threats seemed to be his lot in life.

  Take Arthur Holmwood, for instance. He was a big one for threats. The morning after the Westenra’s party, he’d visited Quincey’s lodgings, bringing with him Dr. Seward and a varnished box with brass hinges.

  “I demand satisfaction,” he’d said, opening the box and setting it on the table.

  Quincey stared down at the pistols. Flintlocks. Real pioneer stuff. “Hell, Art,” he said, snatching his Peacemaker from beneath his breakfast napkin (Texas habits died hard, after all), “let’s you and me get real satisfied, then.”

  The doctor went ahead and pissed
in the pot. “Look here, Morris. You’re in England now. A man does things in a certain way here. A gentleman, I should say.”

  Quincey was sufficiently cowed to table his Peacemaker. “Maybe I am a fish out of water, like you say, Doc.” He examined one of the dueling pistols. “But ain’t these a little old-fashioned, even for England? I thought this kind of thing went out with powdered wigs and such.”

  “A concession to you.” Holmwood sneered. “We understand that in your Texas, men duel in the streets quite regularly.”

  Quincey grinned. “That’s kind of an exaggeration.”

  “The fact remains that you compromised Miss Lucy’s honor.”

  “Who says?”

  Seward straightened. “I myself observed the way you thrust yourself upon her last night, on the terrace. And I saw Miss Lucy leave the party in your charge.”

  “You get a real good look, Doc?” Quincey’s eyes narrowed. “You get a right proper fly-on-a-dung-pile close-up view, or are you just telling tales out of school?”

  Holmwood’s hand darted out. Fisted, but he did his business with a pair of kid gloves knotted in his grip. The gloves slapped the Texan’s left cheek and came back for his right, at which time Quincey Morris exploded from his chair and kneed Arthur Holmwood in the balls.

  Holmwood was a tall man. He seemed to go down in sections. Doctor Seward trembled as Quincey retrieved his Peacemaker, and he didn’t calm down at all when the Texan holstered the weapon.

  Quincey didn’t see any point to stretching things out, not when there was serious fence-mending to do at the Westenra’s house. “I hope you boys will think on this real seriously,” he said as he stepped over Holmwood and made for the door.