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Ten minutes in town, and someone already wanted to kill me. It was like my superpower. I didn’t actively seek conflict—I had to admit that I’d thrown down the gauntlet, but he had provoked me—and yet somehow, I managed to rub people the wrong way, as though my pheromones marked me as an antisocial animal, the junkyard dog who didn’t play well with others. Or maybe they sensed the killer inside and reacted at a cellular level with instinctive, atavistic anger toward a perceived threat.
By the glitter in the lawman’s eyes, it was a close thing.
I picked up my coffee cup left-handed and flattened my right on the table, preparing for the first two moves: coffee to the face then shoving the table into the sheriff. It would buy me the second or so I would need to fire a magical lightning bolt down on the sheriff’s Stetson. Game, set, match.
A corner of the lawman’s mouth twitched up. The twitch turned into a grin, which evolved to a chuckle. I remained tense. I had seen guys laugh up a storm seconds before they blew a man’s head off.
“Nail—nail my dick to a door!” the lawman said through his chuckle. “Now, that’s funny. That’s funny.” He raised his right hand, a gesture of peace. “Not that you couldn’t do it, and all. You look a salty old bo—ah, a salty feller, for sure. You might or might not, but let’s say we don’t find out right now. That all right with you?”
“Sure. Okay.”
“I’m gonna have to remember that, for true. Dick to the door. Hah!” The sheriff extended a hand. “Let’s try that again. I’m Sheriff Archibald Bridger. And you said you were Judge...”
“Shivers. Calico John Shivers.”
“A judge?” The sheriff swallowed his disbelief with a visible effort. “You’re a judge, huh? We don’t normally see people of your... people of your age as judges.”
“Emancipation. It’s coming to a neighborhood near you.” I had used my title as bestowed upon me by the Admins, yet I had procured a judge’s robes and accoutrements, so my garb matched my title. One of God’s cosmic chuckles.
“Yes, yes, I understand.” Bridger cleared his throat and looked away. His lips pursed in a thoughtful frown, and he said nothing for a time. “I apologize for my rudeness. The town’s a little on edge lately, and I get knocked into a cocked hat around strangers.”
I toyed with my cup. The coffee was lukewarm, but it would still serve as a distraction if flung at Bridger’s eyes.
Bridger returned his gaze to me, a speculative gleam taking hold. “Since you’re a judge, and all...”
I cocked an eyebrow.
“Why don’t you finish your supper and come on over to the jail. We have a need for a trial. The mayor was gonna preside, but maybe you’d like to take a whack at her, Judge Shivers.”
“A chudge? Why not you are saying this earlier?” Gerda had arrived with a pot of fresh coffee and a blue plate covered with a wedge of apfel pie. “Mein Sheriff, would you like some pie?”
Bridger shook his head. “Thank you, Gerda, no. I have to get moving.” He scooted back and put his hands on his thighs as if having to push himself upright.
“Who’s on trial?” I stabbed a chunk of pie. My belly was stuffed tighter than a family car on summer vacation, but hey. Pie.
“Ach.” The German woman gestured to ward off the evil eye. “Da vitch.”
“Davitch?” I looked from one to the other. The first bite of pie melted in my mouth. Tart, sweet, cinnamony, with an air-light crust. I needed to find out if Gerda was married. “Who’s Davitch?”
“Not Davitch.” Bridger’s blue eyes were deadly serious. “The witch. First one I’ve ever seen, but there’s no doubt she’s a witch. We’ve been waiting to have a trial so we can hang her, legal and all.”
“Legal,” I said after I swallowed. “Right.”
“Think you could lend a hand?”
“Glad to help.” A trial was nothing to me. I made a living by executing wizards without a trial. I was a paid assassin. “Due process” referred to how I cleaned and oiled my weapons before a job.
“Mighty whi—mighty kind of you, Your Honor.”
“Just let me finish my pie.”
#
The jail was five blocks away—two west, three south—and built entirely of stone. The upper floor had only narrow-slit windows covered in bars, while the downstairs facade included a picture window with “Sheriff’s Office” painted in gold letters across it. A short, shaggy pony and a medium-tall bay mare occupied the hitching rail, leaving barely enough space for us to tie off our mounts.
I held Misery’s bridle and focused on the animal’s brown eyes.
Play nice with your new friends.
They hate me.
If you’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to you.
Misery snorted and tossed his head.
The jail contained two tables, both being used as desks, four chairs total, a gun rack, and a black potbelly stove. A framed map of the territory hung on the back wall. The stove’s chimney leaked a thin ribbon of smoke from a joint near the middle, fogging the room with an acrid cloud. One man sat at each desk: on the right, a sheriff’s deputy drank coffee from an enamel mug, and on the left, a round dandy puffed a submarine-sized cigar, adding a pungent stink to the rancid smog. The back door at the rear stood open, allowing a cross breeze to clear the air in fitful gusts.
“Mr. Mayor,” Bridger said, “meet Judge Shivers. Shivers, this is Mayor Bunting.”
“What!” The cigar-puffer hopped up and bounced around the desk, hand extended. His three-piece suit was wrapped around a body built like a globe, with stubby legs and short arms. A round head bobbled atop the globe, sporting slicked-down black hair and a waxed mustache more impressive than the spread on a longhorn bull. “Mayor Stokely Bunting, at your service.” He goggled at me with eyes the size of hard-boiled eggs. “I say. You are a colored.”
“And you’re English.” I shook the proffered hand, which Bunting snatched back and swiped against his vest. Another friendship died in childbirth.
“Judge Shivers, here,” the Sheriff interjected, “ain’t a colored man. He’s a quarter-man. Quarter this and a quarter that. And if you sass him, he’ll nail your dick to the door. Nail your dick to the door! And this”—Bridger gestured to the seated man—“is Deputy Potts.”
The deputy touched a finger to his hat. “Call me Clay.”
Bunting recovered his poise with the ease of a born politician. His look of dismay morphed into unctuous smiles and oily apologies. The sheriff perched a butt cheek on Deputy Potts’s table and tilted his hat back. Bunting settled in one of the visitor chairs, insisting that I take the sheriff’s desk chair.
“I must say, Judge Shivers,” Bunting began, stopping to touch a fresh match to his cigar. “I must say, you’re a very odd duck for a judge. Normally, men who’ve obtained the bench aren’t quite so...”
“Dark?”
“Young, I was going to say.” The mayor’s eyes darted away, and he busied himself by picking tobacco bits from his lips.
“I want to see this witch. Where is this evil hag?”
The three townsmen looked at the ceiling. Bridger pointed up, in case I might not understand that the cells were upstairs.
“Bring her down here.”
The men traded looks.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded.
“She’s sedated,” Bridger said. “The only way we could keep her from getting out. Every time we locked the cell, she’d”—he whirled one hand in a twisted circle—“somehow get out. I never did see how. The doc gave us some stuff to keep her quiet. We figured she’d stay that way until come time to hang her, and all. I got a man upstairs, watching her.”
Christ on a bicycle. “How long?”
“What?”
“How long has this woman been drugged?”
Bridger twisted to address his deputy. “What is it now, Clay? Four days?”
“’Bout that, I reckon.”
I rubbed my eyes and counted backward from ten. These people... It was contrary, what with being a paid killer of magical people and all, but something about drugging an old woman and holding her in a cell didn’t sit right with me.
Sooo, it’s okay to kill her but not to get her high?
Shut up, brain, you’re not helping. Besides, I don’t have a conscience, so don’t start acting like there’s one hiding up there.
Something of my thoughts must have shown on my face. Bridger turned red, and Potts focused on the stack of papers on his desk. I stood and took a turn around the office, pausing at the map on the back wall. I found Geyser Falls after some determined searching. Turned out the river was the Owens, and the mountains I traveled through were called the Inyos. To the west lay the Sierra Madres, which at least I’d heard of. Treasure. Humphrey Bogart. No stinkin’ badges.
“Look here, Shivers,” Mayor Bunting blustered after a long silence. “You don’t know what this woman has done. She’s a witch, I say. A witch.”
“Then we should hang her,” I replied without inflection.
“Let me lay it out,” Bridger said. He ticked off points on his fingers. “First, the Catholic church that all the Mexicans go to burnt to the ground, which ain’t a real surprise, the way them papists is always lighting candles, but them that saw it says the thing whooshed up all in one go, like a bonfire soaked in oil. Then Pastor Allen, down at the Baptist church, grabs his throat midsermon, his face turns purple, and he keels over deader than Dick’s hatband. I know ’cause I was there.” Bridger’s lips thinned. “Daniel Allen was a friend of mine.”
“You see?” Bunting interjected. “You see the attacks are the work of the Devil!”
“And then,” Bridger continued, “the bank is burglarized. Front door is found wide open, like somebody used a key, and the vault is the same. Wide open. About ten thousand dollars gone. Nobody saw a thing. Nobody heard a thing. Lucky for Ned Waterston, the bank manager, he was drinking at a saloon in front of a dozen witnesses the time it happened. Otherwise, I’d have arrested him for an inside job. An inside job.”
I grunted. “So your atheist witch steals all this money then hangs around?”
“But that ain’t all.” Bridger ticked off another finger. “Three miners head out for their claim after stocking up on supplies. Two days later, their wagon is found, all the supplies untouched. No sign of the miners. They just disappeared. Then other folks start vanishing. The Blankenship boy, playing out in the scrub east of town. One minute, there, the next minute, gone. Then the Methodist church is burnt to the ground. Then a family of farmers, out north of here, up and vanishes, with food laid out on the table and animals left unfed. Then we find this here strange woman—the witch—out in the eastern foothills, wandering around, wearing a man’s clothes and babbling strange things. We thought she was just addled, at first, but with all these other things... Ain’t hard to put two and two together. Two and two together.”
I stood and cracked my neck with a head twist. I wanted to twist somebody’s head off, but I compromised. I could be reasonable.
A rush of footsteps pounded outside, and a man with a face like a Persian cat burst through the opening, wild-eyed and panting through the fur on his face. He blinked at the crowd of people then singled out Sheriff Bridger. “Archie! There’s a crazy kid behind the Wheel. He’s done killed two fellers—and tried to eat ’em!”
Bridger had his hat on and was stomping for the door before the last of Fuzzy’s words were out of his mouth. “Potts, tell Barton to stay put upstairs, then come a-runnin’. Bring a scattergun.”
A sick feeling took root in my guts. The image of Moorcock’s flayed and filleted corpse flashed into my head. Did Birnbaum send some of his menagerie to follow me back in time? Is that what I felt watching me? Birnbaum created things that loved to kill. If the “crazy kid” was a Birny special, Sheriff Bridger had no clue what he was walking into.
“Shells,” I demanded. I drew Moorcock’s Colt and flipped open the loading gate. Potts, on his way to the rear stairs, tossed me a box from a drawer at the base of the gun rack. I loaded the two empty chambers while on the move. “Bunting, no more dope. I want that woman awake and sober.”
“But—”
“I’m in a bad mood, Mayor.” I paused in the doorway and favored the round man with a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t fuck with me.”
“Ah, yes. Yes, quite.”
From several blocks away, the popping of gunshots peppered the night.