“What are you doing?” the man asked. His features, while normally bland and passive, took on an aggressive edge once he spotted Mason.
“I’m here to get the money Virgil needed,” Mason said in a rush. “You must be Virgil’s regular partner.”
The man still looked suspicious but was now equally confused. “Yes,” he replied. “I’m Bob. Who the hell are you?”
“Phillip Everly,” Mason said, using one of his standard aliases. “Virgil has someone on the hook and needs some funds to cover a whale of a bet. He must’ve sent you to help me get this money to him.”
“I never heard of you.”
“But you’re his partner, right?”
Bob seemed just as confused this time as the first time Mason had asked that question. The fact of the matter was that most cheaters who had to rely on machines and loaded dice also had to rely on partners to make their job easier. Plus, figuring out the identity of the man who had the key to Virgil’s room wasn’t much of a stretch.
Mason stood up straight and made no attempt to hide the money in his hands. It was too late to do that anyway, so he went so far as to keep stuffing what he had into his pockets. “Are you here to help me?” he asked.
“Put that money down,” Bob said.
“Why? We’ll just have to pick it up again.”
“I said put it down!”
“Sure,” Mason said while lowering his arms. He dropped most of the cash onto the floor. An instant before letting go of the few bundles left in his possession, Mason snapped his hands up to send those bills fluttering into Bob’s face. When Bob stepped back and tried to brush the money away, Mason ran straight at him.
Leading with his shoulder, Mason lowered his head and rammed Bob squarely in the chest. The other man grunted as his shoulders hit the door behind him and the handle jabbed into his lower back. Bob swung his hands wildly in front of him, partly to clear the paper from his eyes and partly to get ahold of Mason before he could get past him. He was successful on both counts.
Mason had the end of the hall in his sights when he was pulled backward a couple of steps. If he’d built up any momentum, he might have been knocked off his feet when he was brought to a halt so quickly. Even though he kept his balance, it took him a moment to figure out he was being spun back around. By the time he got his bearings again, Bob was taking a swing at him.
Even though Mason started to turn away from the incoming blow, he wasn’t fast enough to avoid it completely. Bob’s fist clipped his jaw and sent him stumbling to one side.
“You’re not one of Virgil’s partners!” Bob said.
Like most second fiddles in a team of idiots, Bob wasn’t very bright. What he lacked in brains, however, he made up for in aggression.
Mason reached for the gun at his hip, if only to put a scare into the man in front of him. Bob reacted quickly by bringing one knee up and snapping that boot straight out to pound into Mason’s stomach. Thanks to the beating he’d taken that night, Mason was already filled with a dull ache from head to toe. One more kick or punch here and there wasn’t about to make a difference. That kick did knock him back, however, which allowed Bob to reach for his own pistol.
Now that he stood at the end of the hall, Mason had an option open to him that gave him much better odds than testing his speed on the draw. He stepped back and jumped to the side, clearing the hallway altogether as Bob took his shot. The pistol’s roar filled the hallway and hot lead burned into the wall. Mason drew his Remington and kept hurrying down the corridor and away from the hall. Another shot was fired that took a chunk out of the wall behind him. After that, Bob emerged from the hallway to get a better look at what he was shooting.
Mason fired from the hip. The Remington bucked against his palm, illuminating the corridor directly in front of him. His back was to a door to the outside deck and Mason reached with his free hand to open it. The shot he’d fired wasn’t meant to draw blood and knocked a hole into the wall several inches away from anything with a pulse. Bob was either too brave or too stupid to care about the gun in Mason’s hand, because he kept coming regardless.
“Damn,” Mason growled as he stepped into the chilly air. There was still plenty of noise coming from many different sections of the boat, but not nearly enough to mask a pair of gunshots. The men who would be coming to see what was going on wouldn’t be happy to see Mason’s face again so soon.
He lowered his pistol so as not to alarm anyone else he might encounter while walking along the deck. Keeping himself against the rail, he watched the door he’d just stepped through, waiting to see who would come out next.
“What’s wrong down there?” someone called from the deck above. “Was someone shot?”
“Keep your head down!” Mason shouted. He shook his head, hardly believing that his fellow passengers could take an interest in him now when he’d had to fend for himself in so many fights before. Rather than dwell on the strange situation, he opted to try to get out of this one with his skin intact.
“Come back with that money!” Bob shouted.
Keeping his Remington pointed toward the door that Bob was about to burst through, Mason tried to think of his best options. Killing Bob was the first one to spring to mind but wasn’t very appealing at the moment. Even in self-defense, shooting a man on the Delta Jack would only irritate Greeley further. Odds were that he’d reconsider any arrangement he’d made with Mason and just be done with him in the quickest way possible.
“Where’d you go, you bastard?” Bob shouted.
Mason inched along the railing as his mind spun with possibilities. If he gave back the money he’d taken, Bob would most likely lose interest and find somewhere else to go. After that, it would just be a matter of lying low so neither Bob nor Virgil caught sight of him again.
The door was shoved open and Bob came out. He had the wide, round eyes of a dumb animal that had been spooked. One wrong move and it would attack whatever it could reach.
Mason’s gun hand came up so he could sight along the top of his barrel. It was easy enough to line up his sights with Bob as his target. Squeezing the trigger was another story entirely.
This wasn’t a matter of defending himself with less than a heartbeat to choose between life and death.
This wasn’t a chance to keep someone else from getting killed for no good reason.
This was putting a bullet into a man who wouldn’t see it coming. There were plenty of men on God’s green earth who wouldn’t have had much of a problem with something like that. Abner Mason wasn’t one of them.
Bob wheeled around, unaware of the thoughts that had flickered through Mason’s ever-churning mind like so many moths darting past a candle’s flame. Unlike Mason, he didn’t need any time to think before acting. Once he had his target in sight, Bob came straight at him.
“I’ll give you back the money,” Mason said in a rush.
Bob would cover the short distance between them in another second or two.
“What else do you want from—” Mason ducked below Bob’s wild swing and snapped a quick punch to Bob’s ribs. His intention wasn’t to put his man down, but merely back him up a few steps. As soon as that happened, Mason felt his back touch the railing and planted his feet on the deck. “Let’s work this out,” he said. “See? I’ll even holster my gun. This has gone far enough already.”
Mason could tell by looking into Bob’s eyes that the man wasn’t about to gun him down where he stood. Unfortunately he didn’t see anything in there to let him know Bob was about to rush him from such a close distance. If he had seen that coming, he might have been able to get out of the way before being knocked against the railing behind him.
Not only did Bob catch him full on, but his momentum took both him and Mason straight over the side.
Chapter 15
When he heard the wind rushing past his ears and his feet flailing i
n open air, Mason figured he’d merely passed out.
But he was on his way farther down than just the floor. Mason fell for a good couple of seconds, and when he hit, it was the river that was there to greet him.
His back slapped against the cold water hard enough to light a fire behind his eyes. Mason tried to pull in a breath, but was unable to send even a trickle of air into his aching lungs. When he could finally inhale, he got a chest full of river water for his trouble.
Mason kicked and swung his arms in a desperate attempt to keep his head above water. Very quickly, he realized he wasn’t even completely certain which direction was up. Once he’d figured that part out, something pressed against the top of his head to force him back below the surface.
“Tryin’ ta kill me?” Bob wailed.
Mason wanted to say something to that, but most of his face was still underwater at the time. He reached up to grab Bob’s wrist and couldn’t manage to pry it from the top of his head before his strength started to ebb.
“Who the hell are you?” Bob shouted.
His voice rippled through the water down to Mason’s ears, giving him something to focus on apart from the fact that he couldn’t breathe. Bob’s voice, the hand holding him down, the bubbles rising from his mouth—all those things made it clear to Mason’s fading consciousness which way he needed to go if he was going to survive the fall from the deck of the Delta Jack.
Mason reached out to find Bob with both hands. Instead of trying to fight him or even force him to let go, Mason pulled his knees in close to his body so he could plant one foot on Bob’s chest. From there, Mason straightened his leg and drove his weight downward as if he was using Bob as a stepladder to make his way above the water. In a matter of seconds, the tables had been turned and Bob was the one being forced under while Mason gulped down as much fresh air as he could.
His eyes burned and his ears slowly drained as Mason bobbed on the churning river. The sound of the paddlewheel was almost deafening from down there, but at least it gave him a point of reference. Mason now had a good idea of which way he needed to go to get his feet back onto solid ground. Using a serviceable swimming stroke, Mason got himself moving toward the shore with Bob following close behind him.
“You tried killin’ me, but it didn’t work,” Bob sputtered in between sucking in and spitting out mouthfuls of water. “Any real man woulda faced me with a gun in his hand or fought me in a brawl. Only some yellow cur tries to drown someone in cold blood!”
“First of all, you’re barely making any sense,” Mason said while continuing toward the shoreline. “And second, you’re the one who pushed me into the water! How could you have forgotten that?”
“I didn’t forget nothin’. Only reason I did anything was that you were in Virgil’s room stealin’ his money!”
“Well, you got me there. You want to arrest me?”
Bob’s head was wagging back and forth as he dog-paddled toward dry land. “Soon as I get to some law, I just might.”
“Great. Lawmen are usually in a town of some sort. All we need to do is find one of those and you’ll be on your way.”
“You talk real smug now. Just wait and see how smug you are once you get what’s comin’ to you.”
Every so often, one of Mason’s boots scraped against a rock or a thick patch of mud. A few seconds later and he could feel slimy ground beneath his boots. He slowed his kicking, allowed his body to float upright, and then tried to stand up. His feet sank a few inches into the muck, but he was able to support his weight.
When Bob swam close enough to him, Mason put his hand on top of the other man’s head and gave him a push downward. Having already taken his hand away, Mason waited for Bob’s head to break the surface of the water again before saying, “Stand.”
“I . . . I’ll give you . . .”
Mason sighed and pushed Bob down again with enough force that Bob finally managed to touch the bottom. By the time he got around to standing up, almost half of his upper body emerged from the water.
“See?” Mason said.
“You tried to drown me,” Bob grunted.
“I just wanted you to find the bottom. You were flopping around like a damn trout at the bottom of a fishing boat.”
“Boat? Boat! Aw, no!” Bob cried. “Where’s the Jack?”
Mason pointed upstream. “Somewhere that way, I’d imagine.”
“It left us behind?”
“Why wouldn’t it? You think we’re important enough to warrant a search party?”
It took a few seconds, but Bob finally stopped trying to spot the Delta Jack in the darkness. When he turned his eyes toward Mason, he asked, “Where’s the money?”
“Can’t buy your way out of this one, I’m afraid,” Mason said.
“It don’t belong to you.”
“And it doesn’t belong to you either. You stole it. You and Virgil both.”
“We won it, fair and square,” Bob said.
“Fair and . . . and . . . square?” Mason laughed. Each word he spoke was harder to get out than the last. “That’s fine talk coming from . . . from a dice smith.”
“Who’s Smith?”
“You . . . really are . . .”
“What’s wrong with you?” Bob asked.
Mason wanted to answer but couldn’t think of any words to say. That alone was enough to cause concern. His next hint that things weren’t right inside him was when his vision started to blacken around the edges.
He didn’t recall much of anything after that.
Chapter 16
Mason dreamed he was falling.
Falling and toppling.
End over end.
After a while, the toppling stopped. Unfortunately it stopped when he felt he was upside down. Instead of rolling through space, he merely hung there and swayed in short arcs like a pendulum.
His body ached.
It was an ache that soaked all the way down to the bone until it became impossible to pin down the exact spot where it started.
His stomach twisted into a knot, wringing all the bile up to the back of his throat. At least he hadn’t eaten much in the last . . . he didn’t even know how long it had been. All he could say for certain was that whatever was inside him was on its way back up. He opened his mouth, which was all it took to get the wheels turning. Suddenly his entire body tensed and he reflexively reached out for something to grab in the inky darkness that had enveloped him. What he found was smooth and yet coarse. It was moving, just under the surface. Before Mason could figure out what he’d found, he emptied his stomach in a violent wretch.
“Aw, fer Pete’s sake!” someone nearby groaned.
Mason tensed again, only this time there was nothing left to come up. Several dry heaves racked his tired body and when they subsided he felt surprisingly better.
“You make another mess on my saddlebags or did you manage to puke yer guts out onto the ground instead?”
The light that flooded through Mason’s skull was nothing divine or unusual. It was simply his eyelids peeling open after being stuck to his head by a mixture of blood, dirt, and sweat. When he allowed his body to relax, he conformed to a wide sloping shape that had a very familiar odor. He blinked, cleared his throat, and waited for his vision to clear.
“You awake?” the nearby man asked.
Mason let himself hang for a spell, swaying to the movements of a horse’s plodding steps. Before he could get used to the current state of affairs, an elbow was jabbed into his shoulder.
“Answer me.”
The first attempt Mason made to respond was just a croak from the back of his throat. He coughed, winced at the taste of the remnants of what he’d just spat up, and tried again. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I’m awake.”
When Mason tried to move, he found that he could do so rather freely. His arms hung down
to dangle against the horse’s flank, as did his legs. Next, he attempted to shift the weight of his body. As far as he could tell from that small bit of experimentation, he was simply draped over the back of that horse. Placing his hands flat against the horse’s rear haunches, Mason kicked his feet until he could slide off.
“Aw, now you went and done it!” the horse’s rider said.
Mason’s vision was slowly clearing, but his balance wasn’t quite there yet. When his boots hit the ground, he remained upright for a second before his knees buckled and he dropped straight down onto his backside.
The rider brought his horse around, gripping the reins in one hand and a pistol in the other. Mason’s pistol, to be exact. Upon seeing the gun in the man’s hand, Mason slapped a hand against his belly.
“Won’t find that sawed-off model,” the man said. “You won’t catch me with that one twice.”
Mason blinked several more times and then rubbed his eyes. Between the haze in his head and the brightness of the sun, it had been difficult for him to focus on much of anything. With a little effort, though, he could make out the rider’s face just enough to learn his identity.
“Winslow?” Mason croaked.
The rider smiled down at him. “You ain’t forgotten my name after shooting my damn leg. I’m real touched. Now get the hell up.”
“What’s going on?” Recent memories came to him in a rush, sending a wave of panic through Mason’s blood. “Where’s Bob?”
“Bob?”
“He’s the man . . . about my height . . .” Between the throbbing in Mason’s skull and Bob’s distinct lack of any memorable features, it was difficult for Mason to come up with much of a description.
Ralph Compton Straight to the Noose Page 10
